tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40514288929025672532018-03-19T23:50:25.745+01:00trillie sucks at stuffLook, mom, no hands!trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.comBlogger42125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-17198926401314564452018-01-01T16:45:00.000+01:002018-01-01T16:45:36.046+01:00Write<img border="0" data-original-height="439" data-original-width="660" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0SWnAxa_g04/WkpXCbKUvvI/AAAAAAAADEU/IU3MYUmQlCoGLO4ysIBtu4gAWbpkRXJVgCLcBGAs/s1600/write.jpg" /><br /><br />Happy 2018 everyone :)trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-91740816216997822772017-08-18T09:53:00.000+02:002017-08-18T09:53:15.012+02:00I'm alrightThis isn't a real post. This is me dropping in to assure the people who have voiced concerns that my blog may be "dead". I can promise you all that rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated, and I have every intention of keeping it going. I can make no such promises about the frequency of the posts though.<br /><br />There's a couple of reasons for this.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;"></div>The most important one is that since I wrote <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2017/04/thrive.html" target="_blank">that last post</a> (or actually starting a little while before that), I have taken Aristotle's advice and am, silly as it sounds, <i>thriving</i>. The reason this sounds silly is that I am also working my butt off, because I volunteered to work extra shifts all summer (i.e. July through September) to fund my vinyl record/electric guitar/trips to visit internet people-habits, so there are many days where my life feels like some kind of perpetual retail fever dream. On the flip side though, I don't think I have ever managed my non-day job-time as well as I am now, which is why I still wake up every morning at the crack of dawn deliriously excited about life (I get that this sounds deranged, but it's the honest truth).<br /><br /><blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-version="7" style="background: #fff; border-radius: 3px; border: 0; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.5) , 0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 658px; padding: 0; width: 99.375%;"><div style="padding: 8px;"><div style="background: #F8F8F8; line-height: 0; margin-top: 40px; padding: 62.5% 0; text-align: center; width: 100%;"><div style="background: url(data:image/png; display: block; height: 44px; margin: 0 auto -44px; position: relative; top: -22px; width: 44px;"></div></div><div style="margin: 8px 0 0 0; padding: 0 4px;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BNy7UisB6_A/" style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">Ariftotl 😂</a></div><div style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 8px; overflow: hidden; padding: 8px 0 7px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;">A post shared by Trillie. Also Anne. (@trillianne) on <time datetime="2016-12-09T12:04:45+00:00" style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;">Dec 9, 2016 at 4:04am PST</time></div></div></blockquote><script async="" defer="" src="//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js"></script><br />This means that a whole list of things that used to be down time staples for me, have been drastically cut from my life. Some of them down to zero. It's been about 6 months since I moved into this house, and in that time, I haven't fired up Skyrim once. I think I played The Sims for a couple of days in February when I was ill, but that's it as far as gaming is concerned, which is pretty huge for a one time avid gamer like myself who only <i>just </i>finished building her dream gaming rig. I now basically have a rocket launcher sitting by my desk that I use to heat up toast sometimes (also a PS3 whose sole function is to explain to my TV what Netflix is). I do miss it sometimes (especially Skyrim), but that is a price I have made my peace with.<br />Likewise, I have cut all TV, aside from maybe one or two things per season (currently Game of Thrones because duh, and also Bojack Horseman, which you should definitely check out because it just keeps getting better), which was easier to do than gaming, but still needed a little time to adjust to.<br /><br />The biggest time sink of all, though, which I am still working on cutting down, but will never get down to zero, is social media. The reason this is such a tough one is mainly because the internet is where my people live, and I am not about to cut any of them out of my life. <br />The other reason is that I have had to accept that the biggest victim of this will be my blog.<br /><br />The sad reality of blogging is that if you ever want to get anything over ten "hits" a day, you pretty much have to spend quadruple the time you spend creating content on self-promotion, which is a) fucking gross and b) means you need to be on Twitter all.the.fucking.time, or reading other blogs, or cozying up to whoever is getting a lot of hits themselves. If you don't, it pretty much doesn't matter if your content is "one of the best things on the internet" (thanks for that, Ben), because nobody is going to ever see it. And this sucks, because even though I did enjoy reading other people's blogs (and still do sometimes), writing is pretty much the only thing I care about, so that's all I am going to keep doing. I've just stopped caring about getting the views.<br /><br />This means I no longer have to worry about post frequency, and can afford to spend a little more time on each post, whereas before I would sometimes proofread a thing just once because I wanted to hit my deadline. At this moment, I've had a post sitting in my draft folder for well over a month, because it involves structuralism and I have yet to figure out a way to casually bring up Foucault without sounding like a pompous asshat (this may actually be impossible). And that's fine, because I have given myself permission to fiddle with shit until it feels right to post, which might be never. Lord knows there is plenty of other writing that I am never going to let see the light of day, as most of my writing time these days is devoted to a project that I'm not even going to expand upon here, as it's embarrassing, and whose sole purpose is to get me to type new words on a regular basis, because I still have these near insurmountable hangups about writing anything at all, and this way it is at least fucking fun.<br /><br />Last but not least, the whole impetus for starting this blog a little less than 3 years ago (shit, has it only been that long?) was mainly one of self-therapy, because I had never felt so lost and scared and was having huge trouble figuring out who I was and what I wanted from life, and I figured that writing about that would somehow help, as it might help others to read about what I was going through.<br /><br />I am no longer lost.<br /><br />It's pretty funny to me to look back at <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2014/12/existentialism-for-beginners-identity.html" target="_blank">this early post</a> I did, and see how not a single one of these archetypes ended up being remotely me (except for Dave Eggers - that is still a possibility, though I don't think he has written quite as much smut!). I played around with some of them since, and found they were not for me, and cast off others (gaming nerd!) with sad resolve because I traded them in for something better.<br /><br />These days, I am a convinced hermit who spends her days happily sucking at writing and playing guitar, finally reads novels again, mostly enjoys her job because it funds the all-important solo-home while leaving time for the aforementioned sucking, and every once in a while takes short intense trips to go feel all the love and euphoria and abandon all at once that I can't deal with in my everyday life because, after all that's said and done, I still have the emotional maturity of a blueberry scone, and I don't know how to fix that.<br />Ironically, this isn't dramatically different from what I imagined my life would be like when I was little.<br /><br />Looking back on it now, it's still nice to have a bit of a chronicle of how I got here, so I have no intention of taking any of it down just yet, and every once in a blue moon I still get a message from some other human somewhere on this earth who wants to tell me that something I wrote helped them in some way, and that is, without a doubt, the best thing in the world to me.<br />I wish we could all meet and hang out and hug and share stories deep into the night in some warm place without any mosquitos, but for now I am happy just meeting in this virtual in between space where all of our stories sometimes intersect. I'm not going anywhere.<br /><br /><blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-version="7" style="background: #fff; border-radius: 3px; border: 0; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.5) , 0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 658px; padding: 0; width: 99.375%;"><div style="padding: 8px;"><div style="background: #F8F8F8; line-height: 0; margin-top: 40px; padding: 50.0% 0; text-align: center; width: 100%;"><div style="background: url(data:image/png; display: block; height: 44px; margin: 0 auto -44px; position: relative; top: -22px; width: 44px;"></div></div><div style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 8px; overflow: hidden; padding: 8px 0 7px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BWj-odTFSjc/" style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">A post shared by Trillie. Also Anne. (@trillianne)</a> on <time datetime="2017-07-15T09:27:37+00:00" style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;">Jul 15, 2017 at 2:27am PDT</time></div></div></blockquote><script async="" defer="" src="//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js"></script><br /><br />Yeah. I'm doing alright.trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-14461059287707149542017-04-17T15:51:00.002+02:002017-04-17T15:51:46.904+02:00Thrive<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-F1ggK8UXbAo/WKCn1WZ2wDI/AAAAAAAACfY/AeUDDMdKWvYUYI6s90DDKaX5gvOajuSFwCLcB/s1600/bottle2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-F1ggK8UXbAo/WKCn1WZ2wDI/AAAAAAAACfY/AeUDDMdKWvYUYI6s90DDKaX5gvOajuSFwCLcB/s1600/bottle2.jpg" /></a></div><br />One of the popular concepts over in the <a href="https://www.nerdfitness.com/" target="_blank">Nerd Fitness</a> community is that of the "respawn". Putting the "nerd" in Nerd Fitness, it means that if you fall off the wagon, you don't just get back on it, but come back to life at the beginning of a level, just like a character in a video game.<br />People in that group are always respawning all over the place, and I'm no different.<br /><br />I'm currently in the process of a respawn, after allowing myself a couple of <s>weeks</s> months to make sure I was well settled into my new home and back from my latest adventures. Think of it as a belated New Year's. The great thing about a respawn though is that it can happen whenever you damn well please, though if I am being completely honest, I've had a bit of a hard time getting back into the groove of things. This should have been a warning.<br /><br />See, the important thing about a respawn is to learn from the ways that didn't work before, which is challenging for me because I always end up convinced that it is a lack of stubbornness that made me fail, while in fact the opposite is true. I fail because I always end up treating life like some kind of boot camp, where my goals are lists of things ordered by my drill sergeant at 5 am every morning, leading to the vexation of those close to me because they can't grasp why I would need to be so continuously impressed with myself in order to not feel like a loser. This is, of course, exhausting.<br />If I didn't want the promise not to do that anymore to be an empty one, though, I would have to take a long hard look at why I have goals at all, and why they are what they are.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YNeSzymdpAw/WKCoP_49pyI/AAAAAAAACfg/MgKdeynlFHAo960UO9NrolM2xxHbWY7ZACLcB/s1600/bottle3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YNeSzymdpAw/WKCoP_49pyI/AAAAAAAACfg/MgKdeynlFHAo960UO9NrolM2xxHbWY7ZACLcB/s1600/bottle3.jpg" /></a></div><br /><br /><br />If you're one of the handful of friends who have been following my online writing since before 2010, you might remember a long and convoluted post about the concept of <i>entelecheia</i>, invented by Aristotle and butchered by me in many attempts to explain it properly and without comparing myself to a tree. I keep circling back to it though, and when I did this time around, it felt like the perfect answer to the question of how to determine and pursue my goals.<br /><br />(please scroll past this if you don't care for me murdering classical philosophy and just read the article on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiality_and_actuality#Entelechy_or_entelechia" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>, if you want)<br /><br />Because I am a thing that exists, there is some unique way for me to exist that makes me, me. That way of existing is doing something, some action, that a thing like me would typically do. "Oh, it is just like that thing to do that thing," you might say.<br />According to Aristotle, both living and nonliving things have potential that can be actualized, and being busy actualising that potential is the most thing-like thing a thing can do, because by engaging in whatever activity that helps it do that, it is making itself even more like the thing it is, while, of course already being super thing-like just by doing the thing. (someone please shoot me now)<br />A quite boring example of this is that when an axe is busy chopping, it is also busy becoming more like an axe, as opposed to when it is just lying around somewhere where it could be mistaken for nothing but a stick with a sharp bit attached to the end.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OBERAxizUKw/WKCo7CxbqBI/AAAAAAAACfo/VktYL6UPsBMSYLRdudp6L0DOCv1UizW3gCLcB/s1600/bottle4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OBERAxizUKw/WKCo7CxbqBI/AAAAAAAACfo/VktYL6UPsBMSYLRdudp6L0DOCv1UizW3gCLcB/s1600/bottle4.jpg" /></a></div><br />This would mean that my entire notion of a "goal" as some milestone to reach at a far away point in the future is wrong, which is great news for a <s>thing</s> person like me, because as an utter <a href="https://youtu.be/QX_oy9614HQ?t=158" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">marshmallow test failure</a>, the future doesn't motivate me, like, at all (and remember <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/09/do-what-you-love.html" target="_blank">that post I did</a> about how external motivation actually makes you enjoy things less, so it's not just me?). Besides, the future is uncertain, and you can pretty much count on shit happening and moving either you or your arbitrary goal post all the way over there, which is what has been going wrong all of these times, I think.<br /><br />If I think of a goal as just me, functioning well in the present, there isn't really any way such a disconnect could happen, because what "functioning well" is, can vary depending on circumstances. (I just realize I'm advocating for the exact opposite of S.M.A.R.T. goal setting here, radical that I am.)<br /><br />If I try to think about it in this way it seems that a lot of the pressure and nervousness kind of instantly dissolves. Instead of like some kind of boot camp, it feels more like something, a plan that unfolds, and the something is me. And instead of trying to adhere to some arbitrary standard that has nothing to do with me, all I am doing is unfolding and becoming more like me by doing the things that are natural to what a thing like me would do, and is best at.<br /><br />Some of these things take work, yes, but because the reward is no longer external but lies in the doing itself, they only get included if I actually want to do them. The flip-side of that is that while I am obviously a natural at playing video games and eating junk food all day, it's pretty self-evident that this isn't me functioning at the best of my unique abilities (ahem.).<br /><br />There is another word for this that takes a lot less headachey explaining, and that word is "thrive". I'm making it my word of the year.<br /><br />Somewhere last year (probably at New Year's, duh) the Bloggess did a post about how, instead of making a whole bunch of resolutions, a cool other thing you could do was to just pick one word, and have that be the theme of the year. A couple of months later, as I was working in the garden of our cohousing project, I dug up this tiny glass bottle that still had the cap on it, and figured it would be fun to put my word in it for safe keeping (I sometimes do weird things and don't know why). The word I picked then was "YES", which was definitely what I needed at the time. I feel like I've put this word to good use. It has led me to a number of strange and unexpected places. I got a tattoo, and then another one <s>that is still a work in progress only becoming more and more awesome</s> (it's actually finished now - this post has been in my drafts folder for ages as I tried to remember how to <a href="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/58/5e/5b/585e5b8960d35273aff540e2e869df12.jpg">make words go</a>). I met a whole bunch of new people (probably more than in the previous 5 years combined!) and travelled to see them. Most of all, I got to try out a great number of things to see if they were "me".<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-npefUxgPcU4/WKCncUFZqDI/AAAAAAAACfQ/yMim2XzIM9wvgOu7LJq9eA5KFlZ3f5WXQCLcB/s1600/yes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-npefUxgPcU4/WKCncUFZqDI/AAAAAAAACfQ/yMim2XzIM9wvgOu7LJq9eA5KFlZ3f5WXQCLcB/s1600/yes.jpg" /></a></div><br /><br />This year, though, I'm a bit done with saying yes to all kinds of outside things. I'm not going to stop completely, but maybe just turn it down a little bit to make room for the things I have discovered matter most to me. Already the best part of this year is that I am now in a position where I have everything in place for me to do that. Being on my own means that I have as close as perfect control over my priorities as I could reasonably wish for. It means that I can say "no" again because with every year that passes since I was on that <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2014/12/baseline-trigger-warning.html" target="_blank">cliff edge staring down into the abyss</a> it becomes easier for me to know who I am and what my needs are. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C66zfE_twYc/WKCpkfXuw-I/AAAAAAAACfw/fyvw7GwbrJEF5cEl7BfzcykVw9VxiTVAgCLcB/s1600/thrive.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C66zfE_twYc/WKCpkfXuw-I/AAAAAAAACfw/fyvw7GwbrJEF5cEl7BfzcykVw9VxiTVAgCLcB/s1600/thrive.jpg" /></a></div><br /><br /><br />This is why I still don't regret my choice to let the word "YES" <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/07/riding-wave.html" target="_blank">carry me out to sea a little bit</a>. Especially when you are so unsure about who you are and what you want as I have been, it's never a bad move to just go out and try something. Even if it <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2017/01/home.html" target="_blank">ends up being a disaster</a>, at least you will find out stuff about yourself. I have found out that my belief that people-people are somehow better, and so I should try to mold myself into one, is idiotic and futile. It's not that I'm an introvert (like, at <i>all</i>), but I still get pretty fucking drained by the amount of energy it takes to try and be liked by a large number of people who, at the end of the day, are, at best, acquaintances. And since it is hard to suppress my instinct to be such a pleaser all the damn time, it's so much better for me to live alone so that I can at least exhale at the end of the day and not hear myself talk for a while.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QE1_uFUsUh8/WKCqD8obbhI/AAAAAAAACf4/QM6qrbe9-Z84eSAQRU8TApKup-OIUSagQCLcB/s1600/bottle5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QE1_uFUsUh8/WKCqD8obbhI/AAAAAAAACf4/QM6qrbe9-Z84eSAQRU8TApKup-OIUSagQCLcB/s1600/bottle5.jpg" /></a></div><br /><br />Maybe I am a childish and petty person for the amount of joy it brings me to open up my tiny new fridge and look at all the food in there that is&nbsp;<i>all mine</i>&nbsp;and will still be there when I want to eat it, but if a simple thing can make me so happy, why should I care? Maybe I am a neurotic control freak and instead of trying my best not to be that way it would be better to learn to be just a little bit patient with myself. And maybe it is 100% ok to be a little bit like a hermit because for the past months, this house has mostly felt like a blanket fort and every day I wake up giddy that "I can do whatever I want!", as if that somehow wasn't the case before, but there you go.<br /><br />My needs are not like anyone else's, and neither are yours. The very best thing is just to find out what they are. I'm hoping that this year, we can all find what it takes for us to thrive.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-v9-Mjp1Iv_U/WKCqppeo5jI/AAAAAAAACgA/7-9OrxW7Mb8LqHUwZdnx7PrNEg_bIsA3ACLcB/s1600/bottle6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-v9-Mjp1Iv_U/WKCqppeo5jI/AAAAAAAACgA/7-9OrxW7Mb8LqHUwZdnx7PrNEg_bIsA3ACLcB/s1600/bottle6.jpg" /></a></div><br />trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-50433743456281137262017-01-12T19:07:00.000+01:002017-01-17T18:12:48.865+01:00HomeSomewhere in the beginning of last spring, 10 brave and/or stupid men and women responded to an ad looking for people who wanted to live in a cohousing project that consisted of 3 houses and a shared garden. They did this because they believed that sharing resources is the way of the future, or because they didn't like coming home to an empty house at night, or simply (though there might be a tendency to downplay this) because their salaries wouldn't otherwise cover a home that was any larger than a shoebox, and this was the only chance they'd ever get to live in a newly built house with a large garden in an upscale neighborhood.<br /><br />I was one of this starry-eyed bunch, and, as you can imagine, the reality turned out to be not all that idyllic. For starters there is the issue of the landlord being an utter madman (is this starting to sound like the plot of a TV-show? because it kind of feels like it half the time), who, near the end of the construction phase, managed to piss off every single one of his contractors and then decided it would be a good idea to finish the second floors of the houses by himself.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4RYcg8JdOoc/WGJMmC2G-fI/AAAAAAAACE8/_UUBHitaFRkVDCqTyhWjk1v2PXva-TcWgCEw/s1600/shower.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4RYcg8JdOoc/WGJMmC2G-fI/AAAAAAAACE8/_UUBHitaFRkVDCqTyhWjk1v2PXva-TcWgCEw/s1600/shower.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Shower?</td></tr></tbody></table><br />It wouldn't be though.<br /><br />By the time we finally got the group together (which proved quite a challenge on its own) it had become clear that none of the houses would be finished by the time we had arranged to move in. Our countermove as a group was to refuse to sign a lease before the promised second floors would be habitable and all of the houses would be painted as promised. This would allow us to pay a little less rent, because the homes we got were only about 2/3 of what they were on paper. This seemed like a solid plan at the time. Little did we know this meant we would be living on a permanent construction site for the next 10 months, completely at the whim of a deranged creep whom we still thought was just 'eccentric' back then. Hell, we even went along with it when he asked if he could spend the night on the days he would be working in the houses, because, we thought, why not?<br /><br />Well...<br /><br />Some of the reasons "why not" would become clear quite early on, when on multiple occasions he was found standing in the open doorways of sleeping women's bedrooms, leering at them. Or when he forced one of them to kiss him. Or when, after the patience of each and every one of his idealistic tenants had worn thin and the privilege to stay the night had been retracted, he stated that there would be a very good case to make for us reimbursing his train fare, because now he would have to go home at night.<br /><br />None of us have managed to deter him in any way from showing up whenever he pleases, using his own keys to enter (which, yes, is breaking and entering, but we don't have a lease -hey, remember when we thought that was so clever?) slithering around the houses like the glib little eel he is, doing preposterously little work (while what little "work" he does looks like the above photograph), making inappropriate comments at the women and being discovered sitting at my neighbour's kitchen table at 7 in the morning, reading a fucking book.<br /><br />I can actually hear him creeping around in the hallway as I type this, apparently under the pretence of trying to fix what he did to the wall when he tried to paint it...<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-e02Q3amtN9k/WHeIgpvJ5wI/AAAAAAAACKc/aBC1MI0thdAWBZanD0Sk53bO93tQuqR2wCLcB/s1600/hall.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That wall was newly plastered and perfectly flat before he started. Also see how he tried to "sweep" up all his spilled paint using a broom. A broom. I actually have pictures of him doing this but am afraid it might be illegal to post them on the internet.</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Of course I might be able to laugh all this off as some of my neighbours do (the ones who haven't yet fled the scene) if it wasn't that me and my roommates couldn't possibly be any more mismatched, and that is me being incredibly fucking diplomatic here. If it wasn't that I've learned in the past year just how much I need a safe and fairly predictable place to call home and this place is not that. And if it wasn't that it turns out that I am, at 34, a whole lot more materialistic than 16 year old me would have found acceptable, and that no matter how much I would like to be the type of person who is "just chill" with all of their stuff being broken or accidentally eaten and having drunk people in their backyard at two a.m. yelling "Fuck yououou! FUCK YOUOUOU!!!" at the night sky, I just can't will myself into being that person.<br />There is also the matter of skeletons falling out of the closet on a weekly basis, like when I discovered after putting in 30m² of flooring by myself (because things would have been so much easier if we had all just chipped in and done at least the paint job ourselves, instead of handing the reins to Creepy McLurk) that our basement actually isn't flood-proof as promised, because the contractor who built these houses is an even bigger con man than or landlord is.<br /><br /><blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-version="7" style="background: #fff; border-radius: 3px; border: 0; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.5) , 0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 658px; padding: 0; width: 99.375%;"><div style="padding: 8px;"><div style="background: #F8F8F8; line-height: 0; margin-top: 40px; padding: 28.194444444444443% 0; text-align: center; width: 100%;"><div style="background: url(data:image/png; display: block; height: 44px; margin: 0 auto -44px; position: relative; top: -22px; width: 44px;"></div></div><div style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 8px; overflow: hidden; padding: 8px 0 7px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BM9BIYmhSSv/" style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">A video posted by Anne Vangerven (@trillianne)</a> on <time datetime="2016-11-18T13:36:32+00:00" style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;">Nov 18, 2016 at 5:36am PST</time></div></div></blockquote><script async="" defer="" src="//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js"></script><br />Most of all I am just done. I have been for a long time now, which is why I am finally moving out this weekend into a house I can't afford (even less now because as it turns out, when the time came to make the extra hours I've been working into a permanent thing, my boss preferred to give them to a girl who's been working there for all of a year) but if being poor again is what it takes to finally get out of this place, then that's what I will have to deal with.<br /><br />If I haven't written any New Year's posts, it is partly because of all of the above, and partly because my new year officially starts this weekend. It isn't a moment too soon, because while the first couple of weeks after I found the new place I've felt like Indiana Jones fleeing a collapsing temple, praying to make it out in time for one last quick snatch of a hat, the state I am in lately is more like that thing cats do when they are tired of you chasing them and can't see a way to escape, so they just press themselves against the floor and hope for the best. Or maybe it's just my ex's cat who does that.<br />It was the work thing that made me finally snap, and made me quickly spiral into my current stage of depression, which is the one where I'm paranoid to even talk to people because I am afraid I will accidentally say something that will make them find out that <i>I'm really a terrible person</i> because I can't trust myself when I'm like this. I probably shouldn't be writing posts right now.<br /><br />But if anyone is going to understand how I feel, it is the assorted bunch of misfits that are trying to hide away in the internet this very moment as they battle their own versions of winter depression. We all know the drill by now. We've been there before, and we know we can survive, and how to deploy every spare ounce of energy left to battle the black dog. We know we will get out of this, and come out stronger on the other side. We know exactly what we have to do to get there. And when there's nothing else left, it's this knowledge that will bring us home. So this is written as a reminder to you as much as it is to me.<br /><br />We will make it home.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-v66w63TY9qk/WHeiDmqWMiI/AAAAAAAACKw/eq_ECovnUYwepR0Z0JzI7-mujJzElTOUwCLcB/s1600/moon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-v66w63TY9qk/WHeiDmqWMiI/AAAAAAAACKw/eq_ECovnUYwepR0Z0JzI7-mujJzElTOUwCLcB/s1600/moon.jpg" /></a></div><br />trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-15902368816196605852016-12-05T14:20:00.000+01:002016-12-05T14:20:39.444+01:00These bonds are shackle freeA couple of weeks ago I was in Cologne to celebrate my love for the band that has helped pull me back from the brink every time in my life when I've needed saving. It was touch and go there for a bit, because the weekend before I was supposed to leave I had come down with something awful (much drama was made about maybe not being able to go) so that when I finally decided on Tuesday that I was well enough to at least get on the train, it was mainly to spend time in my hotel room where I drank lots of tea, and in the Starbucks across the river Rhine, where <a href="http://dormousevsdragon.blogspot.be/" target="_blank">bejoes</a> was (also more tea). As a result, the only part of Cologne I got to know intimately in those couple of days was the part that connected these two places: Lovelock Bridge.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EyKcaaB3T8M/WEVaJyUEiaI/AAAAAAAABuU/1w44sqa-BSAQT2tz3cLfcivkFoxmaYPeQCLcB/s1600/lovelock_bridge.jpg" /></div><br />I took a ton of pictures every time I crossed it, huddled in my hoodie, and in my still slightly feverish head all I could think about was all those people who had thought it suitable to symbolize their love by locking their hearts to a fence, and how utterly terrible it was that they had all been conned into doing so of their own volition. All I could think was that someone should come along to free them.<br /><br />I may have gotten cynical about love, because I've never been in a relationship that didn't end in the exact same way, no matter how it started: in feeling trapped, stuck, completely unable to evolve, and with the growing realization that all you are doing is bringing out the absolute worst in each other. Maybe I just suck at love. The thing is: I just don't want to do it anymore.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GHMHutD2YVo/WEVaSHkHRCI/AAAAAAAABuY/hCiORPnoMpwRP0h_35YYYH9d50j4sryugCLcB/s1600/say_it_with_chains.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Say it with chains. Ha.</td></tr></tbody></table>People have told me that it's too soon, that I will change my mind, and if they're slightly older than me, they might even tell me that I just don't want to put in the work. But I have put in the work, and found that if you're putting in so much work, there better be some amazing fucking reward involved, better at least than finding after years of ironing out the kinks that you are no longer lovers but a pretty good management team, even if you don't have kids or anything particular to manage. Finding that you are now even losing the amazing friendship that started it all, until you become "partners", which, congratulations: you are now German business associates.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9saOOAoumkc/WEVaqM3my4I/AAAAAAAABuc/4y_-25Nhhd0ay7WRYb_RmXnK8ep5vuOYwCLcB/s1600/glitterlock.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The glitter almost makes it better.</td></tr></tbody></table>They might tell me that I am afraid to take risks, but I'm not. I even took the risk of taking my broken heart and moving into a community of people I have never met before, filled with hope of togetherness and building something unique and beautiful out of nothing, but I have learned the same lesson here over again as I did in my previous relationship: that you can't build something unless all the people involved are committed to do so.<br /><br />I will also never stop taking the risk of crossing borders to go hang out with people I have only met through words on a screen. It might sound like a silly undertaking at best, but in all my years of doing so, this has given me the very best experiences of my life, and some of my most cherished friendships. I'm not about to move in with them or anything, but the bonds we share are of a different kind. They are based on a shared willingness to let go of social contexts and come together in the glow of a screen to talk about our innermost fears and desires and silly adorations without any of the inhibitions that come with dealing with people in the flesh. To stay up late talking about the nature of happiness with some Canadian person you've never met. It is a wonderful gift of our time that you can know and love and support another person without ever really knowing what they look like, or even their gender. For all the fuss we make about people who use social media to advertise their perfect and completely fake selves, there are just as many people out there who, like me, find it's so much easier to be real when you're stripped of all the social anxiety that is holding you back in the meat world. It's the modern day equivalent of late night conversations with strangers in bars, only without the drunkenness and fear of getting hit on. And in the same way that reading a book is like a long, deep and personal conversation with an author, the internet can grant you a tiny glimpse inside a person's head that you might have missed if you'd known up front that they smelled kind of funny or maybe had too many knees, or whatever else that puts you off.<br /><br />You can look at that and say it's superficial, but in a way it is exactly the opposite of that. Or maybe I'm just saying that because I kind of suck at anything else.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_aFj6PmUlXQ/WEVbC1o9AmI/AAAAAAAABug/CK_z6Gaa3g4VYmstQhvEqSqTb_D1FikQgCLcB/s1600/polyamory.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Polyamory?</td></tr></tbody></table>This was also the trip where I fell deeply and instantly in love with The Mirror Trap, who are a bunch of wild men with clever lyrics (that address just the kind of thing I'm clumsily trying to get across here) and a singer who prowls the stage in red lipstick like the love child of Kurt Wilde and Brian Slade. I even got to talk to them afterward for a bit, and may have told them to "stay awesome", which makes me sound like a particularly uncool American teenager, but if I allowed myself to dwell on all the embarrassing things that keep falling out of my mouth I'd never say anything again.<br /><br /><blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-version="7" style="background: #fff; border-radius: 3px; border: 0; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.5) , 0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 658px; padding: 0; width: 99.375%;"><div style="padding: 8px;"><div style="background: #F8F8F8; line-height: 0; margin-top: 40px; padding: 50.0% 0; text-align: center; width: 100%;"><div style="background: url(data:image/png; display: block; height: 44px; margin: 0 auto -44px; position: relative; top: -22px; width: 44px;"></div></div><div style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 8px; overflow: hidden; padding: 8px 0 7px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BKGYaqWBK2p/" style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">A photo posted by Fans The Mirror Trap (@fansthemirrortrap)</a> on <time datetime="2016-09-08T15:18:59+00:00" style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;">Sep 8, 2016 at 8:18am PDT</time></div></div></blockquote><script async="" defer="" src="//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js"></script><br />It's so easy for me to lose myself in my love for a band or a book or some other cultural phenomenon it's actually pretty funny, and it's also very clear how being involved in any fandom fulfills a deeply human need for tribalism and communion and ecstasy that everyone anywhere gets from something that used to be organized religion but are now sports events and raves and Comic-Con as opposed to dancing around a fire to the lead of a Shaman healer. But the basic mechanics are still the same, and so are the people. We're still all just lost in space.<br /><br />I've also written <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/03/i-renounce-fish.html">before</a> about how coming together over sharing these passions builds a bridge to other people that can almost cross the impossible distance between two minds. But it's a bridge without locks, so in many ways safer. It's definitely safer to be in love with a concept than a human being.<br /><br />So maybe I am scared, and broken, and terrified of anything but this.<br /><br />But for the next couple of weeks, as I head out again to join the madness and sing and dance and sweat and hug people I've never met before, I can't imagine anything I'd rather want.trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-36744908061867970092016-09-29T13:12:00.001+02:002016-09-29T13:12:59.767+02:00TruantI don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I've been this excited about fall. I am absolutely drunk on the light and the smell of the air and the prospect of cozy afternoons indoors with a book. It has even come so far that my current enjoyment of Stranger Things is about 10% plot, 30% 80's nostalgia, and 60% gushing over fall scenery. (Plus about a million percent being utterly in love with <a href="https://67.media.tumblr.com/66d1ee61e7400849eea2e23e56393674/tumblr_oame91Wa3b1r0cdiuo1_250.gif" target="_blank">Dustin</a>. That kid is just awesome.)<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JHDsBR2ooa4/V-o6KpjoylI/AAAAAAAABWY/iaj3KFfHYFkuIDR9GwEgkcsEF5Z1FtLxQCLcB/s1600/Stranger-Things-Woods.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Who cares about that missing kid? Look at the pretty leaves!</td></tr></tbody></table>Ever since I was little, September has always been my absolute favorite time of the year. I think it's a lingering remnant of being such a huge nerd when I was in school, even though that was at least 14 years ago, because somewhere in the back of my brain I am still expecting the singular joy of getting my hands on new school books and secretly reading them all late at night with a flashlight before school has even started (always leading to disappointment when the teacher would finally come to my favorite parts only to skip them, of course).<br /><br />It's not that I don't love summer, but those days on the cusp of <a href="https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative-gourd-season-motherfuckers" target="_blank">decorative gourd season</a> when there's a new crispness in the air and you know the entire back catalogue of The Cure is the only music you'll ever need in your life, are when all my senses are suddenly awakened and my blood starts buzzing with anticipation.<br /><br />It's kind of funny how every year I get this rush of feeling like I am about to jump from the edge of a cliff on a hot windless day and maybe taking flight, that amazing things are just about to happen, while I should know as well as we all do by now that the only thing that lies beyond fall is <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/11/seasonal-depression-bug-out-bag.html" target="_blank">Depression Season</a>™, and then after what seems like decades, spring again. <br /><br />But for as long as that heady back-to-school feeling lasts, I can use up every single last drop of it to tackle my to do list and all my projects and goals that have fallen by the wayside during the hot, sticky summer. So for the last couple of days I have been frantically solving the frustrating puzzle of "when the hell am I going to find time for this?".<br /><br />I should probably tell you that starting September, I have gone back to working my old hours at work, which feels kind of fraudulent in the light of <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/08/24-hour-week.html" target="_blank">this post</a> I wrote last year. I promise I still believe in all the things I wrote back then, but the truth of the matter is that my situation has changed and a girl has to look after herself a bit. It's pretty great to have money again and I'm certainly grateful for the opportunity. The trouble is that the whole reason why I cut back on my hours in the first place was that I felt (well, not just <i>felt</i>) like all I ever did was work, and outside of that I barely existed. As you can imagine, I am pretty determined to not let that happen to me again.<br /><br />This means that while I finally feel like I am in a place again where I can get back to sucking at other things besides cohabitation (loooooooooots of sucking at that in the past few months) for a change, I'm having a bit of trouble fitting any of them into a week that has effectively lost an entire extra day to the thrills of customer service. Me being me though (and largely inspired by a conversation I had with my friend and hero Teros from NerdFitness), I figured all I needed was a <i>system</i>.<br /><br />I talked here before about how sometimes my neuroses drives me to try and come up with the perfect life organizing app which then has me desperately trying to learn some programming language at 3 in the morning, but this isn't like that, and I'm sort of weirdly proud for not falling into that hole again.<br /><br />What it is started with the knowledge that I once managed to fit a full class load of university courses around a 3 day work schedule <i>for 3,5 years</i>, and those were among the happiest days of my life. So instead of treating my hobbies as optional, why wouldn't I tap into that magical September-feeling and treat them <i>like school?</i><br /><br />So I started doing exactly what I did back then: first, I meticulously tracked every last bit of where I spent my time in an Excel file for a couple of weeks, to give me some base data (this is already pretty fun if you are an obsessive data nerd). Then I figured out from that that if I subtract all the time I spent eating, cooking, sleeping, working and doing chores and stuff, I end up with more or less 30 hours a week I can divide over the things that really matter to me. That's actually a lot!<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NGsyuVS-3ZY/V-pB3wdIBII/AAAAAAAABW0/uhZtRUlzKFoAopaIb2Ro1MjsMfp4vLZfACLcB/s1600/grid.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Of course it's going to be color coded.</td></tr></tbody></table>This is where the fun begins. What do you most want to spend your time on? It was enlightening for me to do this exercise, because even though I usually feel like I'm all over the place, as it turns out I do have some clear cut priorities at the moment and, surprisingly, losing 2 hours on a random Thursday morning because I suddenly <i>have to </i>Photoshop Britney Spears' hair onto a coworker's new profile picture isn't part of them.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fFBACJZt6b8/V-zzOv7Yq3I/AAAAAAAABXE/DLgS6QE6lTE1Q38jaOzEix1nC3FQu8X5QCLcB/s320/pinya.jpg" width="319" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I have a strange sense of duty.</td></tr></tbody></table>What they are:<br /><ol><li>Meditation (also yoga and journaling, which are the three pillars of "Let's Keep Trillie Away From The Deep End")</li><li>Exercise (because I'm kind of doing a thing right now that has been super important to me for years and I'll probably talk about it later because holy shit)</li><li>Writing (obv.)</li><li>Guitar</li><li>Reading</li><li>Photography (or at least figuring out how my camera works and sometimes using it for a change)</li><li>Hanging out with friends</li><li>Staying up way past my bedtime because I just discovered <a href="http://imgur.com/gallery/R9NCh" target="_blank">this</a> exists and I simply have to make <a href="http://i689.photobucket.com/albums/vv255/Trillz0r/random/there.jpg" target="_blank">some of my own</a> right this fucking now and share them with the people who live in my internet so we can all piss ourselves laughing.</li></ol>From here on, you simply award hour budgets to each thing, and then actually plan them into your schedule. Lemon squeezy.<br /><br />There were a couple of things I realized as I was doing this. The first was how good it feels to have these dates set up with myself and stick to them. But then, as I slowly began to grasp just how much time 30 hours really is, it began to dawn on me how absolutely impossible it would have been for me to do this had I still been on the life trajectory I was on, and just how fucking spoiled I am, because what kind of mom with young children in which universe has 30 hours a week to spend on herself? It's gluttony is what it is.<br /><br />And then it hit me: instead of going back to school, what I'm actually doing is playing <i>truant</i>. I'm skipping out on <i>Life</i>, or at least Life as I thought it was going to be, in order to work out and play games and do terrible midnight Photoshop. I don't just live in a <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2016/09/macaroni-guilt.html" target="_blank">teenager's room</a>, I actually get to live like a teenager! That's crazy and wonderful and a completely unexpected consequence of all the heartbreak that went before. I just never realized that that was going to be what I signed up for. But I do now, and that is making me even more giddy than the prospect of falling leaves and the return of The Walking Dead. Because nerd or no, the very best part of going to school is when you get to skip it.<br /><br />This is going to be awesome.<br /><br />PS: Because I'm kind of serious about getting back into photography (or at least just taking loads of pictures), I now have an <a href="https://www.instagram.com/trillianne/" target="_blank">instagram account</a> that you can follow and check out what I'm up to and also all the animals I encounter now that I live in the suburbs because apparently it's like a freaking zoo up in here. It's not public, but I accept anyone who requests to follow.trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-15352875882309936202016-09-18T18:26:00.000+02:002016-09-29T13:39:51.747+02:00Macaroni GuiltHey, remember when I had a blog?<br />I seem to remember that was kind of neat, but then all sorts of stuff happened and I managed to drop off the face of the earth for six months or so. I'm sorry about that.<br /><br />What happened was, roughly, this:<br /><br />For the first couple of weeks after I wrote my last post, I was simply too sad to write, as I was trying very hard to find a way to function as a newly single person while still living with the person I had just singled myself off from, <i>for three months</i>, and most of those months were spent crying behind closed doors and being taken home by kind managers after throwing up in the bathroom at work and relearning how to do all the basic sort of life things with a hole in my heart. I also vaguely remember watching loads and loads of <i>Buffy</i>, up to a point where I can't be 100% sure which things happened to me during that time and which were written by Joss Whedon.<br /><br />Then came the day when I finally got to move out and spend every waking hour of the next couple of weeks putting together the place that would become my new home, which turned out amazingly well. I honestly never thought I could ever love another place as much as the home I left behind, and I guess I never realized how much I missed having my own space that wasn't just a part of the living room. I wish there were a female equivalent term for "man cave", because that's really what I made for myself here. To celebrate this achievement I ordered a gigantic bulletin board, planning to turn it into an inspiration board, only around that same time I discovered in one of my boxes that I still had most of the shit I put up in my apartment when I was in my early twenties, and now it's full of old gig tickets and mementos and buttons and general Placebo related stuff. As you can imagine, I don't mind this at all. It was a fantastic way to reconnect with this little part of me I felt I'd lost, plus I get to live in a room that feels like it belongs to a teenager, <i>only with the infinite wisdom of adulthood at my disposal!</i><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KVYhHJHSBIk/V96p8hpuGCI/AAAAAAAABVw/XfZhkRObzTwG2DtB4ZOjtyu7ClxjnhihgCLcB/s1600/regression-board.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My inspiration board turned into a regression board so quickly there was literally nothing I could have done.</td></tr></tbody></table>The other thing that I put up there was the macaroni banner that I used for my blog, which I thought was a good idea at the time. This was before the first time I was suddenly hit in the face with a piece of macaroni. As the days grew hotter and more humid, I was regularly assaulted by falling macaroni as my banner slowly started to disintegrate, as if every falling piece was an accusation of neglect: <i>"What about your blog, asshole?"</i> *PAW* <i>"You're inspiring nobody right now, dipshit!"</i> *POK* <br />This was the beginning of my macaroni guilt, which I'm pretty certain is a kind of guilt not even my mom knows about.<br /><br />This did not deter me in any way from ignoring it even further though, and then other kinds of things started to come into play whenever I thought about writing. Like how was I supposed to write about my life now without writing about the people from the community I was now a part of? I surely couldn't write about <i>them</i>, could I? I had always made it a point to only share stories that were my own, but now that I was living with so many people, did I even still have those? Who was I? WHERE DID I BEGIN AND END?<br /><br />Then I started to freak out that everything I'd write would sound like it contained nothing but subliminal messages to my ex-boyfriend, which was even more ridiculous in hindsight, because he didn't even read my blog when we were together, and obsessively analyzing subtext has very much always been <i>my</i> thing, not his.<br />Then there was the time around June where I suddenly thought <i>"Hey, I haven't thought about him in a while and I feel kind of ok"</i>, which promptly made me feel so guilty I could barely breathe, as if breaking up entailed some sacred pact that we would both be miserable for the rest of our lives. I managed to feel absolutely terrible for an entire week over that single thought, and not write about it once, macaroni guilt be damned.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AExuZzpCERU/V96rZ3F9OdI/AAAAAAAABV4/CSI4pJaGI9YTXqy32CxoydTkCHlcGV7ZgCLcB/s1600/macaroni-guilt.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That hat is a reminder of how much I love it when people humor me at parties.</td></tr></tbody></table>After a while it got to a point where even the thought of writing anything made me feel like I had just eaten an entire turkey. If any of you emailed me during this period and I didn't get back to you: be assured I hate myself for this. There's few things that piss me off more than when people don't reply to my messages, and now I was turning into one of those inscrutable non-responder people myself, living in a vague realm of unconfirmed plans and unanswered questions!<br /><br />I can't explain it other than that I felt like there was this invisible thing weighing me down, preventing me from writing even a short sentence, and just the thought of it made me almost sick to my stomach. It really was like a block of some sort. Someone really ought to come up with a word for that. Other than "macaroni guilt", I mean.<br /><br />By then I was back in the all too familiar waters of hating everything I'd ever written, and knowing with absolute certainty that anything I would ever commit to paper in the future would be complete and utter shit and would probably start World War III somehow, but now there was the added element of knowing I had alienated my entire audience, all seven of them, and I would have to start over completely from scratch, and besides, there wasn't anything going on in my life worth writing about anyway, since I was no longer depressed or very anxious or coming up with absurd coping strategies for my crippling self doubt. I mean, sure, I had just taken a giant leap I still can't quite believe I somehow had the courage to take and moved in with a bunch of complete strangers based on some vague hope of being part of something unique and beautiful, but who wants to read about <i>that</i>, am I right? Everyone knows nothing profound was ever written by someone who was even remotely happy.<br /><br />Slowly but surely though, I could feel myself starting to feel whole again. Because I <i>did</i> leap and landed flat on my face but I got up again and suddenly it was August and I had been living here for 5 whole months and learned so much in those months that I can't for the life of me believe that it has only been 5 months (well, it has been 6 by now), because in that time I went through so many emotions that they feel like a decade's worth. There have been bonfires and parties and projects and dancing in the kitchen and even more crying, and a couple of weeks that were so bad I genuinely started looking for apartments because I couldn't take it anymore. But I decided to stay, and somehow, against all expectations, I came out the other side of that knowing myself a little bit better, and feeling yet a little bit more like me.<br />I learned about what I can do, and I learned about people, which is really my favorite topic and always has been.<br />I learned that getting over someone isn't the linear process you hope it'll be, but comes in waves just like everything else, until you wake up one day and realize you haven't felt that pain in a while now, and you are no longer angry but just glad you both got out of that without hating each other.<br />I learned that I am so much stronger than I thought, and am only just beginning to tap into what I could someday be.<br />I discovered that I do, finally, genuinely love myself.<br /><br />And somewhere in between all that, I also let go of my macaroni guilt.<br /><br />I am leaping again now, back into the blogging realm, which is quite honestly more like a hop, because <i>it's just a stupid blog you guys</i>, even though not having anything planned out properly and not really knowing where I'm going to go with this does scare me just as much as it always has. But I missed it, and I missed you, so I'm here.<br /><br />Let's not make it so long this time.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-r9vVhSNM98s/V96veB8lmnI/AAAAAAAABWE/sZ6MHrbfzhUkukPWl9yWczgUEgxI8xN9wCLcB/s1600/macaroni-guilt2.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I guess all that is certain at this point is that there will be STUFF.</td></tr></tbody></table><br />trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-10398125162835206032016-02-03T11:02:00.000+01:002016-02-03T11:02:25.755+01:00The Year of SuckWhen I started this blog a little over a year ago, it was at a time where I'd felt stuck in one place for a long, long time, and I was pretty miserable because of it. Among other things, I felt like I had utterly lost what it meant to be me. I didn't know where to go from there, but I was looking for small steps I could take that could take me... somewhere. When I wrote <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2014/12/existentialism-for-beginners-identity.html" target="_blank">this</a> post, I was only partly joking. It's a horrible feeling to not know who you are or what the point of your life is supposed to be.<br /><br />The idea to make it about sucking at things was equals parts joke, self-flagellation (sorry, people who scolded me for that) and epiphany: I knew I had to get out of my comfort zone, and I knew that wherever I went, it would suck, but so would staying where I was. I figured that if I could teach myself to appreciate the bumbling steps I took whichever way I took them, that would be the key to open up the world to me. And it was. And it did. I never could have guessed where it would take me.<br /><br />I will be moving out soon. Out of this house, which I love, and which has been my home for almost 7 years. Away from a relationship that has been my home for even longer. I cannot possibly tell you how much it hurts to clearly see how necessary both of these endings are. What I can tell you, is that I can finally say with certainty that I know I'll be ok.<br /><br />I know I will embrace the world this year. I will go out to meet it, and I will fail at things and it will be glorious, because it will be new and strange and scary but I have trust in me.<br /><br />I don't know where I will go, and I'm not going to lie to you and pretend that this doesn't cause me to have days where all I want to do is wrap myself up in a blanket and watch Buffy like a burrito of sadness, because it does. There are days when I am on the verge of crying every single hour of the day. I almost cried over socks the other day, because my sister got them for me and they were so incredibly soft. <i>Socks</i>.<br /><br />But I no longer want to choose to not choose, just because that is the safe thing to do. I want to live and grow and fall and pick myself up again, because that is what living is supposed to be. I know this much.<br /><br />I will continue to suck at blogging, even though I will never "<a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/12/monetization-preparation.html" target="_blank">monetize</a>", because it helps me to organize my own thoughts if I have to figure out how to shape them into a blog post, and sometimes I get an email from someone on the other side of the <i>planet</i> telling me that my ramblings have somehow inspired them or helped them understand themselves better, and that is, without question, the best feeling in the world to me.<br /><br />I will continue to suck at making new friends, applying my 20 seconds of courage to say hi and introduce myself and exposing myself to the very real possibility of someone not liking me or thinking I'm just too weird, and the equally real possibility that this will be the beginning of a genuine connection with another human being.<br /><br />I will continue to battle life's various <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/04/happiness-fishbowl.html" target="_blank">addictions</a> and the <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/02/overcoming-agoraphobia.html" target="_blank">debilitating shortcomings of my brain</a>, because they prevent me from truly living, and even though trying to wrangle them feels like handling snakes in a basket sometimes, I have come this far, and every fall has only made me stronger. Those snakes have nothing on me.<br /><br />I will continue my <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2014/12/colors-of-gentrification.html" target="_blank">bumbling attempts at being creative</a> through whatever medium strikes my fancy at the time, and maybe I will share some of it and you'll all get to go snort-laugh and tell me that's not how any of that works, but that won't matter because it will be fun.<br /><br />I will continue to <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/06/fat-girl-running.html" target="_blank">move my body</a> in awkward and embarrassing ways, because no matter how ashamed I am about it and how hard I have to fight to go out there, making my body do challenging things makes me feel strong and powerful, and lord knows I need that right now.<br /><br />I will be here if you need me. Up there singing in the rafters, trying to find my voice.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><div class="videoWrapper"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="510" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DN43sCyEanA" width="854"></iframe><br /></div></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">With thanks to the mighty Teros for pointing this out to me. :)</td></tr></tbody></table>trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-59606627169157600702016-01-12T11:46:00.000+01:002016-01-23T09:30:59.459+01:00Worst SEO everThis is another year-in-review post that is long overdue, partly because I'm a horrible procrastinator, and partly because on the exact day when my blog turned one year old, the world came down here in my little corner of Western Europe, and since I was (and still am) much too cowardly to even begin to write anything about what happened that day, I opted not to write anything at all.<br /><br />A couple of weeks later my own personal world came crashing down, and that shit is somehow even more painful to write about here, and on top of that it is not just my story, but the story of us, and I'm not one to go and share other people's story on the internet, even if in this case it is exactly 50% mine.<br /><br />What I did want to share is that I learned a lot in my year of blogging. I've had a couple of blogs before, but never out in the open like this, and the things I've learned have been surprising and wonderful and scary and weird, which is exactly what the internet can be expected to deliver on any given day.<br /><br />I've learned, for instance, that the internet tends to respond in the exact opposite way of any boyfriend I ever had:<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="166" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UBdV77d8A6U/VpTJ-AZpthI/AAAAAAAABUU/YWqcy7fYzYM/s640/goal-completions.png" width="640" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Really, internet?</td></tr></tbody></table><br />This makes perfect sense to me, because I'm still vaguely convinced I willed the internet into existence when I was twelve by praying for a world in which we could relinquish our awkward bodies and meet in a space that consisted solely of minds. Of course I had more of a talking cloud society in mind, but I guess some other people were praying for weird porn, so this is what we got.<br /><br />I've learned that the internet is full of amazing bloggers, from the darkly poetic (<a href="http://thecluelesspixie.blogspot.be/" target="_blank">the clueless pixie</a>), to the hilarious (<a href="https://pinknoam.com/" target="_blank">The PinkNoam</a>), the kind (<a href="http://www.crankoutloud.com/" target="_blank">Crankoutloud</a>) and the brave (<a href="http://www.rubbershoesinhell.com/" target="_blank">Rubber Shoes in Hell</a>). I've learned that there are always people who understand exactly how you feel, and you only have to find them. I've learned that the world is filled to the brim with friends you haven't met yet.<br /><br />Mostly, though, I've learned that having the word 'sucks' in your blog title is, without a doubt, the worst SEO move you could ever make. I think I deserve some kind of award for this, especially since I put a genuine amount of research and effort into deciding what the concept of my blog would be, only to come up with the absolute worst idea in the history of the internet. It means that if my blog were ever to be found by anyone, it would exclusively be by people who thought that all the things I write about because I love them, well, suck. I've learned this from my Google search results:<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QRroDrl9xpc/VpTMWDUdGxI/AAAAAAAABUg/pM5VIiLbVt8/s1600/everything-sucks.png" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">NO THEY DON'T!!!</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Basically, I have created the perfect system to only attract people who'd hate me, along with the occasional vampire or demigod:<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KPYuzkHWCfA/VpTMjZEJC3I/AAAAAAAABUo/IZKHgI5BxuQ/s1600/immortality-sucks.png" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I feel you.</td></tr></tbody></table><br />At least I can take comfort in the fact that despite our differences, we'll always be united in our shared disdain for raisins.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1PPRv5uZ79M/VpTMqyfwoFI/AAAAAAAABUw/Didz62n0d0g/s1600/shittiest-raisin.png" /></div><br />Those so-called "raisins", man. They ruin it for everybody.<br /><br /><hr width="100%" />UPDATE:<br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-adopoHSiesg/VqM536oYNsI/AAAAAAAABVI/I4HeYjmLyN0/s1600/search-results-suck.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-adopoHSiesg/VqM536oYNsI/AAAAAAAABVI/I4HeYjmLyN0/s1600/search-results-suck.png" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Checkmate, Google :p</td></tr></tbody></table><br />trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-42130685645994974662015-12-09T13:50:00.000+01:002016-01-05T13:12:13.671+01:00In preparation for monetizationSo my blog turned one year old today! Well, not today, but somewhere around this time anyway,<a href="#1" name="top1" style="font-size: small"><sup>1<sup></a> and I'm pretty stoked about this, because according to the internet blogging gurus, it is around this point that my readers should all of a sudden start begging me to let them give me money.<br />Now I'm not supposed to give you guys what you want right away. I'm supposed to let the begging swell to a critical mass where people are <i>almost</i> but not quite in physical pain due to their suffering from lack of ways to give me money (sussing out where this point is without allowing people to experience actual physical pain is exactly the kind of weighty responsibility expected from a serious blogger), and only <i>then</i> am I to open the floodgates that will lead me to become an instant internet billionaire. I can't wait!<br /><br />As you can tell, this is all very exciting, and while I wait for the cries of desperation to start flooding my inbox, I have already thought of a couple of ways to make the process of you giving me money more fun for everyone.<br /><br /><h4>Trillie sucks at stuff™ original banner macaroni T-shirt!</h4><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="316" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qFpdEVB-zfY/VmbuAA3RrhI/AAAAAAAABSk/5IW3F8_IWzA/s320/macaroni-shirt.png" width="320" /></div><br />Only instead of having it printed, <i>I'd glue on actual macaroni!</i> Mind=blown, right?! Every piece would be unique and obviously cost an insane amount of money because I'd have to glue on every piece of macaroni individually by hand and I already wasn't too fond of doing that the first time around. It would so be worth the price though. Also, the inevitable occurrence of pieces of macaroni falling off would only make it even more unique. Plus, in a pinch, you could put it in the hot wash if you were very hungry, and then you could eat it.<br /><br /><h4>Evil Trillie™ T-shirt!</h4><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="316" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zpEzzae8itw/Vmbvx80zkBI/AAAAAAAABSw/RgdKOzZmh1Q/s320/evil-trillie-shirt.png" width="320" /></div><br />These would be way cheaper but only come in bundle packages because, honestly, why wouldn't you want one of these for every day of the week? I'm actually thinking of going ahead and having a bunch of these printed for all of Boyfriend's mates anyway, because the idea of him never feeling safe again no matter where he goes is making me feel all warm and tingly inside the way girlfriends do.<br /><br /><h4>Happiness fishbowl™ fishbowl!</h4><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="271" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nGNqUaYkwFg/Vmb4CXvP0WI/AAAAAAAABTY/cPiIMQwoaIY/s320/happiness-fishbowl-fishbowl.png" width="320" /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><i>I know right!</i> <br />It's fishbowl-ception! Finally you could express your love for all things meta while also letting visitors know how happy you feel in relation to "having fingers" by slowly suffocating a real live animal. You could also use it to fool your roommates into thinking your drugs are anywhere outside this bowl, and then keep them in the bowl anyway, because that's just how whimsical you are, and fuck them, right?<br />(Fish not included.)<a href="#2" name="top2" style="font-size: small"><sup>2<sup></a> <br /><br /><h4>Awesome exclusive self-help e-books!</h4><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Eiw2WUF-jdc/VmgNISWzhhI/AAAAAAAABTo/lM4oN7NXhIo/s320/i-don%2527t-fucking-know.jpg" /></div><br />The amazing <i>I don't fucking know</i> would, despite its slapdash cover design, totally fucking warp your mind, and be available exclusively through giving me your credit card information and a written statement allowing me to extract any funds that I would later decide would cover its total value (this is hard to calculate in advance, seeing as I don't yet know how many lives will be forever changed by it, and I can't predict the fucking future.) Qua content and structure, it would mostly follow the familiar model of me oversharing my own worries and woes in the signature self-indulgent manner you have all grown to know and love, leading to pleasant insights and revelations à la <i>"maybe I ought to just lighten up"</i> etc, through the careful application of such psychological tricks as admitting in advance that I, i.e. its author, don't fucking know either, thereby crafting a bond that encourages exactly the kind of atmosphere of trust and vulnerability that stimulates personal growth.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5pAHzdLV228/VmgaP-o0HrI/AAAAAAAABT4/-yQAEoIpb2c/s320/i-can%2527t-predict-the-fucking-future.jpg" /></div><br /><i>I don't fucking know</i>'s as yet unfinished successor would have me try to cast off all conscious knowledge of the past, thereby enabling me to write whatever the fuck I want without constant anxiety on whether or not it has been done before. As a result, it may end up including long verbatim reproductions of existing literature. Or, it may not. I can't predict the fucking, etc. (You can kind of get a feel of where most of the humor will come from in this one.) In it, I will encounter the reader in the tension-space between the kind of ruthless sincerity that could almost be a disguised cry for help,<a href="#3" name="top3" style="font-size: small"><sup>3<sup></a> and the insidious irony that blankets every possible utterance of anybody in my generation. Its soon to be released trailer video would feature small groups of different ethnicities all around the world scanning the title in unison with an undertone of joyous relief at the recognition of their ability to <i>just let go</i>, and then sharing a hearty laugh like the quirky harmonious beings that they are.<br /><br /><h4>Painful self-analysis™ camp™!</h4><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="252" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LYjzAAPaNMs/Vmb2p2pgBMI/AAAAAAAABTM/4L6qpf9sD9w/s400/sad-campfire.jpg" width="400" /></div><br />This would be where the real opportunity to give me money would be. I'm thinking about 300$ a head given all 8 of us could probably go there in one of those miniature buses disabled people use to go on field trips, and then when we're there live on macaroni T-shirts for the most part. Also, if any of you has a licence and is willing to drive us and pay for gas, you'd get a free Evil Trillie™ shirt out of it. Just the one though, but I would sign it.<br />Other than that it would mostly be like any other camp, except that every night we would sit by the fire trying to pinpoint the exact moment in our youth that set off the inescapable causal chain™ that is now steadily carrying us towards inevitable doom™.<br />When I say "we", I really mean "you", because aside from sharing a miniature bus ride with you, I would only be doing a quick Krusty the clown-like appearance near the end, where I would quiz you all on the various hidden messages in my e-books. There wouldn't <i>be</i> any hidden messages, but I would make you look for them anyway in a kind of bastardized Western interpretation of a Buddhist koan, trying to get you to the point where sudden self-insight would make you collapse into a weeping heap on the forest floor (I'd expect a lot of uncontrollable weeping).<br />Then we'd have a Joy Division singalong or something. ™.<br />(Norman Reedus not included.)<br /><br /><hr width="100%" /><div style="font-size: small; line-height: 1.5em !important;"><a name="1" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>1</b></a> Actually, not even around this time anymore either. I have got to stop being so slow. For all I know, the begging-for-money sweet spot has already passed, and you are out there writhing in pain as we speak! See, this is why I'm not cut out to have any kind of responsibility ever. <a href="#top1" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /><a name="2" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>2</b></a> If this means nothing to you, you should probably check out <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/04/happiness-fishbowl.html">this post</a>. <a href="#top2" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /><a name="3" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>3</b></a> It wouldn't be, though. <a href="#top3" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /></div>trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-61416452012267120562015-11-10T17:53:00.000+01:002015-11-10T17:53:38.883+01:00Seasonal depression bug-out bag<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G7LZFsL3l1w/VkHjwhYEcBI/AAAAAAAABSU/k6Cf5HhNYts/s1600/publish-anxiety.jpg" /></div><br />First of all, I'd like to apologize for dropping off the face of the earth like I did. As is my annual tradition, I came down with a bad case of sinusitis a couple of weeks ago, which made it hard to keep up with the stuff I need to do to take care of myself (i.e. exercise, going outside, yadda yadda). Along with the already diminishing sunlight, this was enough to hand me over to the welcoming arms of seasonal depression, and one of the first stage side effects of this is that I hate everything I write even more than usual. Where normally, I'd just hit 'publish' and then go wallow in a ditch somewhere covering myself in shame and fallen leaves, this time I'm completely unable to even type a sentence without succumbing to the crushing certainty that by doing so, <i>I have just made the world worse</i>.<br />This is why it's awesome that fan fiction is a thing, by the way, because if it weren't for that already being accepted as awful, I wouldn't be able to write at all. And I kind of need to, because this is one of the things that are in my depression bug-out bag.<br /><br />Having just come out of one, I feel pretty silly even calling it that, and even like it might be insulting to people who have to battle <i>real</i> depression that can only be dented with meds. Luckily, being the omniscient super-being that she is, The Bloggess just posted <a href="http://thebloggess.com/2015/10/just-because-you-cant-see-doesnt-mean-its-not-real/" target="_blank">something</a> that convinced me to go ahead and write this post anyway, and remind myself that there are few things out there that are as stupid as rating mental illness.<a href="#1" name="top1" ><sup>*<sup></a> I know full well what it is when I'm in it, and I know one of its signature tricks is to point at you and laugh whenever you manage to fight it back to its lair, pointing out that it was never real to begin with and you are an idiot for thinking it was, so instead of feeling like a survivor, you come off the tail end of it <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/02/overcoming-agoraphobia.html" target="_blank">feeling like a complete moron</a>. This is because it is a bad loser, and all it has to fall back on are lies.<br /><br />I know I've done it though, and I've done it so many times now I think I can justifiably call myself a veteran, even if it makes me feel like a fraud. And this is kind of the whole point, since depression, seasonal or otherwise, may be the only situation where it's not a good idea to trust your feelings. Because depression is a mind-monster that lies and warps <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/07/perception-reality-perception.html" target="_blank">the very tools you need to interpret reality</a>, you need to have faith in what you <i>know</i>.<br /><br />I've accumulated a mental list of things I know without a doubt to be true, and I guess I could call it a truth-list or whatever, but it sounds way cooler to refer to it as a bug-out bag (of <i>truth!</i>), because it effectively helps me to survive and make it through relatively short spells of defectiveness in one piece. Here's what's in it:<br /><br /><ul><li>This will end.</li></ul><ul><li>A shower is always a good idea.</li></ul><ul><li>It is important to spend your <a href="http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/" target="_blank">spoons</a> wisely. Tiny acts of self care are the best investments, because motivation stems from action and not the other way around. Try to think of the smallest thing you could do. Even something like brushing your teeth, clearing your desk or picking up your laundry can be enough to get the ball rolling a little bit. Directing some extra awareness to what you are doing and why reinforces the effect. I've been told you could repeat the mantra: "I take good care of myself, because I love myself," but if that makes you throw up in your mouth a little, you can just say the first half, because that is certainly true. Don't argue with me.</li></ul><ul><li>Writing will make you feel better. Go write some crap. Accept that it will be crap, and write it anyway. Set out to write crap on purpose! Nobody cares. We're all space meat anyway.</li></ul><ul><li>You are not a vampire. I know all your instincts are telling you to lock yourself into a dark room right now, but all your instincts are wrong. What you need to do is put on some clothes and get your ass some sunlight.</li></ul><ul><li>You are most definitely <u><i>not</i></u> "hideously deformed". I don't even want to hear about it.</li></ul><ul><li>This is not a good time to skip meditation. Keep training yourself to stop <i>futuring</i>. Catching yourself when you are obsessing about the future is exactly what you practice during mindfulness meditation, and this is the time to put it into action. Pretend you are in the AA and try to look no more than an hour ahead.</li></ul><ul><li>In fact, now is a bad time to think about any grand topics like your Relationship or your Career or Global Warming. Nothing you'll be able to think about any of these things will be the slightest bit useful, I guarantee you. I know telling yourself you are "not allowed" to think about things will make you want to think about them extra hard, but you can approach it like you're postponing a chore. Just tell yourself "oh I'll think about that tomorrow", and then don't. Postponing chores is easy.</li></ul><ul><li>Walking boosts dopamine. That shit is exactly what you need right now.</li></ul><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fSpypIFWmXw/VkHdoT7gWxI/AAAAAAAABSE/q8ov8I_8ZuI/s1600/science-bitch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fSpypIFWmXw/VkHdoT7gWxI/AAAAAAAABSE/q8ov8I_8ZuI/s1600/science-bitch.jpg" /></a></div><ul><li>Smoking is never a good idea.</li></ul><ul><li>Talking to someone is good, but only if that someone can be trusted to not make things worse by panicking about it. The second best people are the ones who hold you when you tell them that you feel like you are trapped in a horror movie and may never get out. The best people are the ones who have been there, and don't need to be told.</li></ul><ul><li>Your brain will insist on pestering you with memories of every horrible thing that happened to you ever, making it seem like your life up to this point has been one long chain of disappointment and betrayal. This is a ruse, and the only reason it is doing this is because brains are zealous little buddies who want nothing more than to prove you are right about everything, which is why they have a hard time remembering things that don't fit your current mood. <i>It thinks it's helping.</i> Accept it is going to do this, and if that doesn't work, it is perfectly acceptable to read or watch Netflix until 4am. Sleep is important, but not so important that you have to lie awake in the dark all night and take that shit.</li></ul><ul><li>This will end. I put this one twice because it is the single most important one. Again, I know <i>when</i> and <i>how</i> it will end is different for everyone, and yes, sometimes you can't just ride it out without medication. But if you're like me and it comes in waves, just knowing how long it usually takes can be a relief in itself. Try to keep track of time, even if it's just for future reference. Journaling is an invaluable tool, because the monster is deceitful and its favorite thing is to play tricks with time and make things feel like forever. I usually give myself a week or two (or three), while carefully monitoring for red flags like the urge to self harm. Knowing you can survive is the most empowering thing there is, but trying to white knuckle it without proper guidance is a bad idea. As always, remember there are people out there who are trained to help you, and getting help is always a good move. But you knew all that, right? You're pretty smart about that sort of stuff.</li></ul><br /><hr width="100%" /><div style="font-size: small; line-height: 1.5em !important;"><a name="1" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>*</b></a> To be fair, there are about a million things out there that are as stupid as rating mental illness, but that's beside the point. It just means the human race has a mind-boggling capacity to come up with <a href="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9c/32/50/9c32500e0663aa71dc24bacce01b1036.jpg">stupid things</a>. <a href="#top1" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /></div>trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-52377796558073353142015-09-18T09:39:00.000+02:002015-09-18T09:39:12.921+02:00"Just do what you love" and other tips to make you miserable<img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--3gR6vDa-G0/Vfqad7B6DhI/AAAAAAAABR0/XwBgwI9XLVU/s1600/It%2527s-a-trap.jpg" /><br /><br />Raise your hand if you've never loved anything so much that you'd want to do it for 8 hours a day for the rest of your life. Excluding video games. <br /><br />Is your hand raised? <br /><br />Honestly, what is wrong with you? Are you seriously telling me that you don't have a single passion that gives direction to your life, and that will finally allow you to be happy once you've managed to make a career out of it?<br /><br />Yeah, me neither. By the way, I really ought to get into motivational speaking. That was fun just now.<br /><br />If we're taught anything from childhood, it's that the most important thing we'll ever do is to <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2014/12/existentialism-for-beginners-identity.html" target="_blank">pick a thing</a> and then go be that thing forever. Preferably, we'll know what this thing is in our early teens, so we can from then on adjust our course accordingly, lest we get hopelessly lost on trajectories that are not meant to be ours and will not lead us to greatness. This thing will then go on to define who we are and how other people see us, because the first thing anyone wants to know when they meet a new person is not what they worry about on alienating Sunday-afternoons or what they think about culinary fusion, but how they acquire the means to pay a living. Somehow it has become deeply ingrained that who we are = what we "do".<br /><br />This is a great way to mess with your sense of self-worth, because the great majority of us never ends up doing anything all that inspiring in order to make rent. To the contrary: there is a vast array of jobs in this world that make it increasingly difficult to figure out what their practitioners actually <i>do</i>, let alone what the point is (these are the inhabitants of <a href="http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrincham" target="_blank">Golgafrincham</a> notoriously sent away on Ark B in <i>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</i>). A baker bakes and a fireman (or woman) puts out fires. What the hell does a global market relations manager do?<a href="#1" name="top1" style="font-size: small"><sup>1<sup></a><br /><br />There isn't a child in the world who dreams about going into <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/06/last-day-in-customer-service.html" target="_blank">customer service</a> when they grow up, yet a dizzying amount of people (including yours truly) eventually ends up there. And it's not an altogether awful place to be. I appreciate being indoors, and I like that it allows (=forces) me to move my body around all day and lift lots of heavy things. If I had a sitting job, I'd probably be twice the size I am now, and a lot less healthy. I also kind of like copy machines for some reason. Basically, I feel the same way about my job Louis C. K. feels about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3yMRD-3laU&amp;ab_channel=Lornoi" target="_blank">this blue rug</a>: it doesn't make me <i>come</i>, but it isn't a portal to a nether place either.<a href="#2" name="top2" style="font-size: small"><sup>2<sup></a> And that's just fine, as long as you don't let your job define who you are as a person.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3ABvQwiHbzA/VfgFwRU3UcI/AAAAAAAABRg/-n7cFvJbETE/s1600/labor.jpg" /></div><br />I was talking to one of our student workers this summer who told me that she gets a kick out of the statistical analysis of medical data, which is awesome, because that happened to be her field of study, and also something you can do as a job. More power to her. The trouble starts if we can't just be happy for bright kids like her without drawing the reverse conclusion that those of us who <i>don't</i> get turned on by spreadsheets<a href="#3" name="top3" style="font-size: small"><sup>3<sup></a> have somehow failed at life.<br /><br />Somewhere during the past century, we have all decided that this thing we do to acquire money (not to forget greatness), apart from comprising our identity, should also be the main deliverer of the meaning we so desperately crave. It should make us <i>happy</i>. It's no longer enough to just do the work and take the money (like it was in, say, the 1950's). Our job should be something we are passionate about, and the best way to achieve this, is to conquer that holy grail of labor in the Western world: to turn your passion into a job.<br /><br />Supposing there really is a thing that you love doing so much that your idea of an ideal life is to mainly do that thing for 80% of the time, and get paid for it. Wouldn't that just be the best thing ever?<br /><br />Sadly, no. Because <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/07/perception-reality-perception.html" target="_blank">human brains are notoriously bad interpreters</a> of any given situation, the absolute best way to ensure that you will no longer enjoy that thing you once loved so much is to somehow get paid to do it. This is a well documented psychological phenomenon called the <a href="http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/The_Overjustification_Effect" target="_blank">overjustification effect</a>, and it was discovered by <a href="http://courses.umass.edu/psyc360/lepper%20greene%20nisbett.pdf" target="_blank">Lepper, Greene, &amp; Nisbett</a>, three psychological researchers in the 1970's who successfully managed to rob a bunch of preschoolers of their love of art by offering them rewards to make drawings. What happens is that when you receive an extrinsic (or external) reward for doing something, your brain gets tricked into believing that this is the real reason why you are doing it, which effectively diminishes your intrinsic (or internal) motivation. But this is just one of the things that are at play. The other thing that we can intuitively grasp is that when you start doing something fun (like drawing) on a level of intensity which would actually warrant getting paid for it, the reality of what you're doing often turns into something that's no fun at all.<br /><br />As a result of this, rock stars, the ultimate champions of turning their passion into a career, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/25/musicians-touring-psychological-dangers-willis-earl-beal-kate-nash" target="_blank">are among the most miserable people on earth</a>. You could offer that there is a very real chance that their mental issues were what drove them to become musicians in the first place, but imagine sitting in your teenage bedroom clutching a guitar and fantasizing about spending 30 hours a week inside airports or crammed onto a bus, leaving everyone you love behind for 18 straight months, and having every hour of every day planned out for you months in advance, with every synced up step you miss costing everyone around you thousands of dollars. Suddenly that dream doesn't seem quite so alluring after all.<br />You know who, as a group, are the happiest in their jobs? <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4296975.stm" target="_blank">Hairdressers</a>. Sadly, they, too, didn't escape the great Golgafrincham expulsion.<br /><br />The other problem with putting all your eggs in one basket is that it turns you into an incredibly boring person. Most people who are extremely successful don't have very much going on in their lives apart from that one thing they are good at. That's how they became successful at it in the first place. The advent of specialization effectively turned us from beings who needed a very diverse skill set just to survive in nature, to a bunch of idiot savants, some of whom earn salaries equivalent to the GDP of a small nation by being very good at kicking a ball around. The best way to achieve success is to narrow down your skill set as much as possible.<br /><br />I was told as much in plenty awkward career counseling sessions, each time I was asked to list my interests:<br /><div style="margin-left: 6.2em; margin-right: 4em;">- "Let's see... obviously writing, philosophy, dinosaurs... I like fixing things, but only if it involves power tools. Sewing always makes me incredibly angry for some reason. I went to film school for a while. I also get a huge kick out of anything to do with the human brain, and from building computers and stuff, you know, <i>machines</i>."<br /><br />- (Perking up): "Did you study computer science?"<br /><br />- "Oh, no. I basically just youtube how to do stuff. Did you know you can pretty much youtube how to do anything these days? I went through a furniture building phase for a while, but I'm over that now. Sanding stuff down is <i>boring</i>. I just got back into playing guitar, though. Ooh, and I drove a forklift one summer; that was cool."<br /><br />- (Sad now)<br /><br />- "I'm also kind of weirdly into ants."<br /><br /></div>For the record, I'm well aware this makes me a huge flake, but it's <i>fun</i> <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/03/i-renounce-fish.html" target="_blank">getting all into something</a> for a while just for the hell of it. That is where those juicy intrinsic rewards are. In fact, it might be a lot smarter to actively <i>prevent</i> the things you do for their own sake from getting tainted by extrinsic rewards. The reason this sounds crazy is that we live in a society that has a hard time seeing the value in anything it can't put a funny S or E on. As a result, the most loving and precious occupations slip right through the net, while it effectively sucks some of the value back out of whatever it manages to catch. You might be the most awesome parent, creator or volunteer, but none of those will ever earn you any prestige as long as they don't involve the exchange of money. But that's ok, because prestige is stupid. As Paul Graham points out in <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html" target="_blank">this essay</a>: "If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious."<br /><br />The reason so many of us feel inadequate (aside from the fact that at 33, we <i>still</i> haven't founded a startup company) is because despite our desperate searching, most of us have failed to find that one special calling that will translate into a prestigious and lucrative career, and because we are told we need that to be happy. But we don't. On the other hand, we dismiss the entire plethora of interests, activities and passions that actually <i>do</i> keep us hungry to exist, to the undervalued realm of 'hobbies', while they should by rights provide the real answer to that tiresome question of what we "do". We <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/01/fitter-happier.html" target="_blank">sell ourselves so incredibly short</a> this way.<br />Instead of realizing that success is a rare and elusive thing that probably wouldn't make us happy anyway, we conclude that it's us who are faulty. Meanwhile, we remain fooled by that great collective mirage telling us that somewhere, out there, is the career that will, once and for all, lift us up to a place where we'll finally be able to prove our worth.<br /><br />Personally, I kind of gave up on that when the last time I took one of those career aptitude tests it told me I should become a taxidermist.<br /><br /><hr width="100%" /><div style="font-size: small; line-height: 1.5em !important;"><a name="1" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>1</b></a> In trying to think of a pointless job title to go here I stumbled upon this awesome <a href="http://www.bullshitjob.com/title/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Bullshit Job Title Generator</a>. I am sure I've met some of the people who hold these jobs. <a href="#top1" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /><a name="2" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>2</b></a> That I know of. <a href="#top2" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /><a name="3" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>3</b></a> This is a bad example, because I actually do get a little turned on by spreadsheets. <a href="#top3" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /></div>trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-87909194660502438202015-08-11T16:57:00.000+02:002015-08-11T16:57:50.432+02:00The 24-hour work week<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/demandaj/8175285477/in/photolist-dsqtxT-6gCwA7-9ukSAr-8TxewU-2XSVvg-gS69bJ-CPvZN-cRZYhY-LExJX-bZjWP-vAbUma-rbeFh-7tRekr-7A1Bgw-cwd3N9-4awrno-an9zB9-6EpMSF-62MM7n-qyEy2D-5xcxTY-9uwred-buP27v-u5A29q-n3CmdC-et6Vq-3dKcta-34RGLp-53o4h2-85Rr3p-5963LK-6me6fe-ne7TpD-ekBjtt-8e1HDb-5YDCPm-6YCM3f-7DoUrL-7BNSre-i7prJa-aoAdmy-6bw2b6-qwRFHX-6NBiXW-cWezB7-vuyCwp-75Q3Sh-rks4RY-7CrhCv-qYa4o1" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="image by amanda tipton on flickr" border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2WGnK8FBmNo/VcdJSoqGuPI/AAAAAAAABPc/H2ZGINtF9Ws/s1600/freedom.jpg" title="image by amanda tipton on flickr" /></a><br /><br />What if you only had to work 24 hours a week? What would you need to sacrifice? What would you gain?<br /><br />Don't worry: I'm not trying to recruit you for a pyramid scheme. Remember when I said in my last post that I made some tough decisions that have made my life better? This is about that.<br />I recently got a new contract at work that drastically cuts back on the hours I'll be working. So much so in fact, that I could theoretically do them in a single day. They're making me do them in four, though, because retail.<br /><br />The reason this was a tough decision is the same as the reason why it has taken me so long to finally publish this post: it runs counter to everything we are taught is right. With so many people struggling to find work at all (and my own co-workers going up against each other Battle Royale-style when my old contract was up for grabs), why on earth would someone be so ungrateful as to deliberately choose to work less? On top of that, I don't even have any children I can use as an excuse, while the right thing to do would obviously be to try and wrangle those <i>on top</i> of a full time job. When people ask how you are, telling them anything other than a variation of <i>"I'm so busy I have slept a total of 5 hours the past week and all of those were power naps in the car as I waited for my kid to get done with soccer practice,"</i> has become the definitive mark of a deviant. Somehow, by opting out of this way of living, I feel like I am letting all of those people down.<br /><br />The ironic thing about this is that the people who most fit the above description are usually those who have the most wiggle room to make a similar decision. I'm perfectly aware that there are plenty of people in the world who have to combine two minimum wage jobs just to be able to feed their families, and my heart goes out to them. It's an incredibly unfair thing. But then there are also a whole bunch of us who have all the comfort we need but are forgoing time we could spend with family and friends or doing things we love just to accumulate more money for the sake of... what, exactly?<br /><br />I'm certainly not the first smelly hippie to have reached this conclusion,<a href="#1" name="top1" style="text-decoration: none;"><sup>*<sup></sup></sup></a> but it seems like even asking the question has become like a personal insult that can drive folks into vicious rage, as opposed to being harmlessly subversive like in the days of Henry David Thoreau. Maybe I'm over-romanticizing the romantic period here though.<br /><br />Still, it's fairly common sense that after a certain threshold where all your basic needs are provided for, adding more income to that doesn't make you any happier. The funny thing is that when I looked up what this threshold was (<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/17/map-happiness-benchmark_n_5592194.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">about 75000$ a year on average</a>), that's almost 4 times what I made in a year when I was working 5 days a week. If I didn't know any better, I would have concluded from this that I wouldn't be so miserable if I only made more money, while continuing to drive myself crazy by trying to derive some sense of purpose or meaning from my job, like a dog desperately digging for a bone that isn't there.<br /><br />Instead, I've decided to do the opposite. I'm making my day job into a day job again. I love the term "day job", because of its inherent suggestion that this isn't what you are really about. This is just what you do to get by, while your real aspirations lie in some grand dream of making it elsewhere. I don't even have that, though, but that doesn't mean that I can't firmly define what I do for a living as a day job, because the things that give my life meaning are just as important to me. It's just not one thing, but a bunch of little things, like reading, or writing, or learning a bunch of new skills just up to the point where I can go <i>"Oh, so that's how that works!"</i> and then happily lose interest.<br />I'm reclaiming whichever hours I can, so I can invest them in the things that enrich my life. <br /><br />This is actually making me a better employee, because dialing back the importance I place on work has enabled me to stop taking everything so freaking seriously all the time, making me more relaxed and reliable when things inevitably go pear-shaped. The ability to have my coffee in peace, meditate, and then go for a run before work without this requiring me to get up at 5 in the morning might just drastically reduce the amount of sick days in my future. It's also a lot harder to let a place bring you down if you don't have to feel like you're living there. <br /><br />I live somewhere else now. I live in those free hours I can dedicate to doing things I like, but am not necessarily good at, without having to worry if I will <i>ever </i>get good at them. Things that inspire me, or that I haven't tried before. Things that, from a utilitarian perspective, have absolutely no point whatsoever, but are their own reward. Things that make me happy to be me.<br /><br />And for 24 hours a week, I'll professionally try to get people to calm the fuck down about the fact that their throw pillows don't match their whatevers. It's still a pretty surreal thing to get paid to do, but I guess Earth is just a pretty damn surreal place. And most days, I'm still glad to be a part of it.<br /><br /><hr width="100%" /><div style="font-size: small; line-height: 1.5em !important;"><a name="1" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>*</b></a> Disclaimer: Author not actually smelly, though she is a hippie. <a href="#top1" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a></div>trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-31357929429868465402015-07-22T00:29:00.001+02:002015-11-10T17:04:20.425+01:00Riding the wave<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/niallb/6046190992/" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="image by niall62 on flickr" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WFJonHdlHrU/Va5kud5wSRI/AAAAAAAABOs/ciO2Ez66mWI/s1600/riding-the-wave.jpg" title="image by niall62 on flickr" /></a></div><br />I graduated from my therapist the other day. That was new. I am quite certain that this is the first time ever when one of my counseling relationships didn't end with me (or in the early years: my mom) going "Fuck this shit!".<a href="#1" name="top1" style="font-size: small"><sup>1</sup></a><br />It's doubly amazing to me because less than a year ago I was <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2014/12/baseline-trigger-warning.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/02/overcoming-agoraphobia.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/02/and-then-i-went.html" target="_blank">here</a>, having one of the worst breakdowns of my adult life, and the only thing I could hope for at the time was that I would be able to make it out of that without needing to go on meds again or being hospitalized. This last concern went away after a week or two, but they were two hellish weeks (extreme serotonin depletion will do that to a person, and in my case, leads to a level of derealization that is borderline psychotic. Fun stuff!).<br /><br />This makes it extra astonishing to be able to say that I am really ok now. I have made it to the other side. I am riding <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/02/the-tipping-point.html" target="_blank">the wave</a> again. And I don't even have that feeling that I normally get whenever I am up there, that I may be <i>up there</i> but I am also riding a unicycle on a tightrope while juggling all kinds of scary shit that wants to bite me in the face and I desperately want my mom to look at what I'm doing but I am painfully aware that if <i>I</i> even look at what I'm doing I'm going to drop everything and fall to a horrible death, and get bitten in the face. It's not like that. It's more as if a moment ago, I was trying to steer a three-master through a hurricane and failing, and the next time I blinked I found myself washed up on one of those beaches where they take all those photos for inspirational quotes on Pinterest.<br /><br />Because those <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/07/perception-reality-perception.html" target="_blank">doors of perception</a> are impossible to see through from either side, whenever I manage to step through them, what lies beyond becomes something I can only recall in abstract. I immediately forget about the road that brought me there. This sucks, because the result of this is that whenever things go right, I tend to attribute it to luck or circumstances, while when things go wrong, I will still find a way to blame myself. The truth is, of course, that it will always be a combination of both. But I really did do a couple of important things right this time, and I want to remember.<br /><br />The other reason I want to write this stuff down is that whenever I am feeling this much joy, I want to share it with everyone. I want to catch it, bottle it and distribute it, and not even in an internet self help pyramid meme-scheme kind of way, but in a genuine you're-welcome-to-it-as-long-as-I don't-have-to-go-through-the-trouble-of-mailing-it-to-you way. Because if it helped me, it really might also help you someday.<br /><br />So in no particular order,<a href="#2" name="top2" style="font-size: small"><sup>2<sup></a> here's what I did:<br /><ol><li><b>I made sure I got enough sleep.</b> This was actually the most difficult thing to fix, and in the end the only thing that sort of worked for me was taking melatonin supplements for a while. I tried all the other common sense stuff like making sure I got enough sunlight during the day, installing <a href="http://f.lux/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">f.lux</a> on my computer and accumulating an impressive collection of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_response" target="_blank">ASMR</a>-mp3's (which do relax me, even if I rarely get the elusive "brain tingles"), but in the end, I'm just happy I could sort of fix it without having to resort to any prescription drugs. It still takes me one to two hours on average to fall asleep, but bedtime no longer automatically makes me feel like I'm in 'Nightmare on Elm Street', so I'm fine with that.<br /><br /></li><li><b>I switched therapists.</b> Not that I want to speak ill of my previous therapist in any way, but a thing that many people don't realize is that just like in any other relationship, sometimes you have to acknowledge that things just aren't going anywhere. A therapist is someone <i>you hire</i>, so if you've given it a genuine effort and still don't feel like you are making progress, it's not a betrayal if you want to try someone else's approach. Different people respond best to different things, and there are so many approaches out there that it's definitely worth looking into what's best for you. The reason I switched was because I felt sick to death of talking about things, and wanted to go out and <i>do</i> stuff for a change. This meant that cognitive behavioral therapy was a good fit for me. We set out clear goals that I wanted to achieve and broke those up into steps to get there. This doesn't mean that this is the best approach for everyone, but it was for me.<br /><br /></li><li><b>I took a pretty intensive <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/search/label/Mindfulness" target="_blank">mindfulness</a> course</b>, which filled in the blanks in what I (thought I) already knew. The course was an extremely valuable complement to my regular therapy, and has since turned into a daily practice that has become as much a no-brainer as brushing my teeth. I could probably write an entire post about what I learned from mindfulness alone, and maybe I will sometime. One of the coolest things about it is that when you practice meditation daily, you are actually strengthening the part of your brain that makes you able to step back and breathe when things get too intense to handle, and that little pause can make all the difference sometimes. This stuff shows up on brain scans too, so there's nothing voodoo magic about it at all (though it can be, if you think it's more fun that way).<br /><br /></li><li><b>I rekindled some of my old <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/03/i-renounce-fish.html" target="_blank">obsessions</a></b>, which not only enabled me to feel real passion again for the first time after a long bout of depression, but also gave me the opportunity to take two trips abroad (one of them all by myself, which, yes, scared the shit out of me) and meet a bunch of cool people, both on-line and in the outside world. When your depression tries to convince you that nothing in the world can bring you any sense of joy, it can be a good idea to look back to the things you <i>used</i> to enjoy, and try and see if any of those will pull you out a little bit. I realize this can backfire, because the main problem with depression is exactly that it renders the things you used to like incredibly void and stupid, so it's probably something to try when you're already on your way back up. But you never know, one of those things might be exactly what will stoke the fire you need to get out of the hole again. Because it was for me.<br /><br /></li><li><b>I started a blog</b> to act as a consistent reminder to get out of my comfort zone. And I really did suck at stuff a whole lot more. This is something that will probably always be painful to me, but I can tell that I'm making progress from the fact that this week, for the first time ever, I actually played guitar with other people. Granted, "other people" in this case means "my boyfriend" and we all tend to have a somewhat lower shame threshold with people who've seen us naked and have been smelling our farts for the past 7 years,<a href="#3" name="top3" style="font-size: small"><sup>3<sup></a> but I used to not even want <i>him</i> to hear whatever horrible jangle I was producing, so I'm calling it progress.<br /><br /></li><li><b>I decided to start <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/03/saying-yes.html" target="_blank">saying yes</a> to things.</b> Again, this is probably something that is best attempted when already on the upswing and you can see some light at the end of the tunnel. It is also something I still have trouble with, because I tend to forget that while "no" is a great way to protect myself from the outside world, sometimes "yes" is what will actually allow me to have some fun for a change. I'm still working on this one, but if you are someone I like and you ask me out these days, there is at least a 40% chance that I'll say yes to you. This may not sound like much, but that number used to be a hell of a lot closer to zero. <br /><br /></li><li><b>I got active.</b> <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/06/fat-girl-running.html" target="_blank">Maybe not all that gracefully</a>, but I did, and I am. The trouble with this, as with many of the others, is that you kind of need a minimum of base energy to get going. But if you can even as much as work up the courage to go for a walk, studies have shown that taking a 20 minute walk each day has about the same effect as a mild antidepressant. Sunlight is good. Fresh air is good. And once you really get going, you get all the benefits of that sweet, sweet dopamine your brain produces once you get your body moving. Just like anything else, exercise is something that you can possibly overdo, so this may not be the best tip for everybody. If you are anything like me though, it is crucial.<br /><br /></li><li><b>I learned to say "that's not my problem".</b> Another ongoing learning process, but you'd be amazed how much mental energy you can free up if you stop trying to fix everybody else's problems. I now say it (quietly!) multiple times per day at work, and that alone has made a world of difference to how I feel at the end of my shift. Saying it to the people you love (again: quietly!) is a whole lot more challenging, but it's a hard truth we all have to face some day. As much as we can be there for each other to lean on, in the end, our problems are our own to fix.<br /><br /></li><li><b>I made some tough decisions.</b> This may have been more of a result than an action, but I am mentioning it because I really did make them (more on those in my next post), and I wouldn't have been able to a couple of months ago. A cool brain fact about decisions is that we are all wired to rationalize the choices we make in hindsight. This is called <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias">choice-supportive bias</a>, and means that we tend to feel a lot happier about a decision after it is made than we did before, <i>no matter which choice we picked</i>. The decisions where this effect is the strongest are actually the ones we don't have the option to undo. Not that I am encouraging everyone to drastically turn their life upside down (this may be an especially bad idea if you're dealing with mental instability), but if you're a person who, like me, lets herself get eaten by analysis paralysis as if it were a swarm of fire ants, it can be good to just pick something and be done with it. Some of these giant conundrums actually seem somewhat silly now, but that's only because:<br /><br /></li><li><b>I remembered who I am and what I used to like about myself.</b> Again, maybe more of a result as opposed to an action you can take, but that's only if you look at it a certain way, because trying to be unashamed is something you can actively strive for (possibly inspired by <a href="http://www.amberbird.com/na-intro.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">other bloggers</a>). I saved this one for last because as I finally found myself on the other side of the doors again, the thing that astonished me most was how much I had allowed myself to be erased by what I thought other people wanted me to be, until there was almost nothing of me left.<br /><br />The sheer immensity of the fear and relief I felt when I finally realized this, is what makes this the most important one, and the one I need to remember most of all, because come to think of it, that may have been the one time when I <i>was</i> able to see beyond the doors and stare into the abyss that lies on the other side. I know that the nature of the wave is that it must come down again sometime, and I'm sure that it will, but I never want to fall into that abyss again. I want to remember.<br /><br />I am trillie. I have an anxiety disorder. I probably always will. That doesn't have to mean I can't still do stuff or go places. It just means that when I do, I get to experience having a panic attack in a different place on earth. I know I am a quitter, but I am also a start-overer. I am fragile, but I'm also brave. I am a stubborn know-it-all, and I am a generous friend. I love silly things an embarrassing amount. Sometimes I am funny, but not as often as I think I am. I am a 30-something woman without a driver's licence who still wipes her hands on her clothes as a reflex, and can be counted on to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. I will probably never do any of the things most people associate with adulthood, but there are more than a million ways to be an adult, and one of those ways is to know who you are. And when the wave comes, I ride that fucker home.</li></ol><br /><div style="font-size: small; line-height: 1.5em !important;"><a name="1" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>1</b></a> My mom obviously doesn't say "fuck". Or "shit". This is a dramatization. <a href="#top1" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /><a name="2" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>2</b></a> Are you proud that I didn't call my post "10 things that X"? Because I kind of am. <a href="#top2" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /><a name="3" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>3</b></a> This number should probably be corrected for the standard period at the beginning of a relationship where you pretend there is no such thing as farts. Or leg hair. Hey, does anybody happen to know how long that is? <a href="#top3" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a></div><hr width="100%" /><div style="font-size: small; line-height: 1.5em !important;">I apologize for the length of this post, and would like to thank anyone who has read this far. I feel like any of these points could be expanded into a post of their own right though, so if anyone has a point they would like me to write more about, feel free to suggest it to me. In that vain, I now have a brand spanking new <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/p/contact-me.html" target="_blank">contact page</a>, so if anyone wants to email me about anything at all, they can now do that. Yay!</div>trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-71800980365742640082015-07-07T14:34:00.002+02:002015-07-07T14:38:17.093+02:00Perception ≠ Reality = Perception<div style="color: #666666;"><i>"Lines between perception, desire and reality may become blurred, redundant or interchangeable."<br /><div style="text-align: right;">Community finale</i></div></div><br /><b>Perception ≠ Reality</b><br />I was raised, like so many others, with a deep-rooted fear and suspicion of Other People, this faceless mass whose sole reason of existence is to screw you over and judge you for being who you are. "What will People think?" was a very big thing over at my house, as I imagine it being at many other houses just like my own. Needless to say, who I was did not give this imaginary group of people much cause for approval. And it was very clear that if People thought the wrong thing, this would certainly lead to a horrible death of some sort.<br /><br />Having this instilled fear as your base attitude for dealing with the non-fictional people you meet outside your house is a pretty shitty starting point, for obvious reasons. You don't exactly step out to meet them with open arms. Instead, you hide what's inside you and obsessively look for clues on how to fit in,<a href="#1" name="top1" style="font-size: small;"><sup>1</sup></a> while confirmation bias assures you day in day out that you are right, and the outside world is a treacherous place filled with people who want to harm you.<br /><br />Succumbing to confirmation bias is nothing to be ashamed of. Human brains just aren't very good at dealing with information that conflicts with their core beliefs. Rather than getting lost in a messy tangle of possible interpretations whenever a situation presents itself, we tend to interpret that situation so that it confirms our earlier opinions. This robust system allows us to deal with the world in a somewhat efficient manner, which is exactly why our brain has evolved this way. The problem is that when our view of the world is mainly negative, confirmation bias can have a disastrous effect.<br /><br />But perception ≠ reality. Like all important, earth-shattering insights, this sounds like the most banal thing anyone has ever uttered, and yet, there are people who go through their entire adult life without ever realizing this, which is sad, because these lives are often reigned by devastating paranoia.<br />That person talking in a hushed voice over there? Totally gossiping about you. Those guys asking you to sign their petition? Scam artists! That friend complimenting your appearance? Sarcasm!<br />These examples are worthy of eye-rolling because of how clear-cut and easily disregarded they are. Of course this is not the way you think. But the problem with confirmation bias is that it doesn't just shape our interpretations of things, it also shapes our behavior in ways that are far more subtle than just not smiling very often or avoiding eye contact with strangers. The way fear becomes interwoven in our entire existence helps bring about the exact type of situation that we are trying so desperately to avoid.<a href="#2" name="top2" style="font-size: small;"><sup>2</sup></a><br /><br />For everything you perceive, there are a) a million things you <i>failed</i> to perceive and b) a million possible interpretations for what the situation actually <i>means</i>.<br />Maybe the reason someone doesn't enthusiastically come over to greet you isn't because they don't like you, but because you aren't exactly the picture of warm cordiality when you run into them either. Maybe they are unsure of whether <i>you</i> like <i>them</i>. Maybe they didn't see you. Maybe they are in a hurry to go to somewhere unpleasant. Maybe their freaking dog just died.<br />The interpretation you eventually arrive at is entirely determined by what your base attitude was in the first place. A former roommate of mine once put it like this: "Sometimes, you go outside and all the girls are pretty, and sometimes you go outside and all the girls are ugly." He wasn't talking about the weather.<br /><br /><b>Reality = Perception</b><br />The second insight I want to talk about here has a couple of different routes you can take to get there. You can get there by doing lots of drugs, or by being really into philosophy or psychology, or simply by being smarter than I am. For me, it was mainly the former (though supplemented by the latter further down the line). Suddenly having the keys to unlock a universe where everything was connected by love, all people were united in their pursuit of this love, and the overwhelming trust that everything was how it was supposed to be led to a period where I was doing drugs religiously, because this universe was so radically opposed to everything life had been for me up to that point that the first time I set foot in it was like a mystical experience.<a href="#3" name="top3" style="font-size: small;"><sup>3</sup></a> This may sound a bit sad in light of <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/04/happiness-fishbowl.html" target="_blank">what happened to me later</a>, but if I don't own what I learned from it, those years will have truly been for nothing. And, aside from an endless supply of anecdotes that all share the same basic setup, the one great gift I cherish from that time is the knowledge that even as this universe of love was just a fabrication of my own mind, so is this universe of fear. <i>So is any other reality we create for ourselves.</i> This is true when you are happy, and it is true when you are depressed.<br /><br />There is no way of knowing what is real outside of the perception of our own mind, because there is no way we can ever step outside of ourselves. Everything we know about reality has to first pass as raw information through our senses, and then be interpreted by our mind through the filter of whatever mood it is in at the time. You only need to have one of those ridiculously heated arguments about what specific color a certain object is to feel the shortcomings of this system.<br />Once again, though, the reason our brain works like this is because it is more efficient this way. Tons of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY&amp;ab_channel=DanielSimons" target="_blank">psychological experiments</a> have shown that while we <i>think</i> we are aware of our surroundings at all times, we actually only perceive those things we pay attention to. With regards to our visual field, for example, what we <i>think</i> is a detailed picture that is up to date at all times, is actually a vague sketch filled in with what we assume is going on. This is the reason we get startled when something suddenly disrupts this illusion (The shrub in the corner of our eye turns out to be a man! Or the one that always gets me: the man turns out to be mannequin! Eek!).<br />In philosophy, the notion that the reality we perceive is a perfect representation of reality as it exists out there is called naive realism. It's called that because, well... <br /><br />While attentional bias selects what we perceive at any given moment, narrative bias makes sure that we tend to only remember events that fit our mood. It takes a surprising amount of conscious effort to remember every little detail of your day exactly the way it happened, and even then, research tells us we get much of it wrong. What we do get right is making sure that the things we do remember fit our story. It's not that we didn't notice our neighbor's cheerful wave or the way the autumn light catches the trees on a particularly stressful day, it's just that these things get filed away as unimportant almost instantly in favor of the memory of that bus you missed, that coffee you spilled, and the way that one coworker is always looking at her phone when you are talking to her. These are the things you'll surely remember come nightfall. Again, this is a very strict selection of an endless list of fairly unimportant events where to remember all of them would necessitate a brain the size of a minivan. The selection you do end up making though, could pretty much tell any kind of story you want. This is exactly what happens when we are depressed, or anxious, or in love. Overwhelmed by confirming evidence, we literally can not see the other side. <br /><br />It can be pretty unsettling to confront the fact that the only reality you'll ever have will always be a fabrication of your own mind, but it can also be the most powerful knowledge you'll ever have, because there is an important consequence.<br /><br /><b>We can choose our reality</b><br />This is a difficult thing to bring up, because through the ages it has been beaten into the ground by so many different peddlers of woo. 'The Secret', anyone? 'The Law of Attraction', maybe?<a href="#4" name="top4" style="font-size: small;"><sup>4</sup></a><br />The horrible thing about woo-peddlers is that they tend to take simple truths about life and then slap on as many layers of bullshit as they need to turn them into foundations for a lucrative industry, making it very hard for rational people like you and I to liberate that little nugget of truth and talk about it without sounding like complete idiots. But simple truths they remain. Everyone knows that on those days when you step outside and "all the girls are pretty", things generally seem to go your way. People seem to treat you differently. Your hair finally does what it's supposed to. Even traffic lights turn green.<br /><br />"The Secret" here of course isn't that you "attract" these things by your attitude, it's simply that out of the million different things that might enter your awareness at any given moment, confirmation bias assures you that you pay more attention to the ones that fit your mood.<br /><br />You may still drop everything and stub your toe, but on a good day, you just laugh about it (well, maybe not about the toe) and forget about it ten minutes later. You may indeed smile more genuinely and stand up straight with your tits out, which might influence other people's behavior a slight bit, but the most important difference is in your own perception of things. Because let's face it; whatever you do, your hair pretty much looks the same most days anyway, and there is no way you have any influence at all over traffic lights.<a href="#5" name="top5" style="font-size: small;"><sup>5</sup></a> Those girls just look pretty because you see them that way.<br /><br />There are people who have somehow dodged the installation of the Great Fear we all inherited from society and our parents, and manage to keep up this kind of positive attitude towards the world at all times, and they are unicorns. They are so rare in fact I've only ever known a handful of them and have exactly one in my life right now.<a href="#6" name="top6" style="font-size: small;"><sup>6</sup></a> I regard them with the quiet awe and fascination we reserve for encountering endangered animals in the wild. Luckily, their confirmation bias effectively protects them from being creeped out by my regarding them in this manner. In fact, it seems to protect them from a lot of things as they hitch-hike and couch-surf their way across the globe, making friends all along the way.<br /><br />"But don't they get screwed?" you of course wonder.<br />Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. The amazing thing is that even if they do get robbed or conned or taken advantage of by someone with bad intentions, they never take it as hard as the rest of us might. They don't see it as confirmation that the human race is inherently bad and out to get them, but just brush it off as a bad thing that once happened. Which is what it is. <br /><br />The question ultimately becomes: which reality do you want to live in?<br /><br />Things may not be as simple as just answering this question. After all, confirmation bias only confirms what you truly believe, so the kind of attitude that shapes your reality cannot exactly be faked. Like Dumbo's feather, it only works if you really believe in it. But there's a certain 'fake-it-until-you-make-it' aspect to it that starts with the willingness to question your own beliefs. Next time you are appalled by someone's behavior, try to think of at least one other possible reason why they might act this way, even if it's just for sport (you can still think they're an asshole, if you want). If you're having a bad day, try to remember at least one good thing that did happen. The reason those gratitude exercises you keep hearing about really work, is because they help restore balance to your skewed narrative of the day. The times when they are most difficult, and the only thing you can come up with is "I have fingers" (a personal favorite of mine), may be the times when it is most important that you do them. It can provide you with a powerful counter narrative when bad things happen, or when the Fear of Other People takes you over. As you can gather from <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/06/fat-girl-running.html" target="_blank">this post</a>, I still struggle with this immensely. But I'm working on it.<br /><br />Answering this question can be a starting point to questioning your very reality, and with time, altering it. It may never be the sort of hippie wonderland controlled substances provide, or where those happy-go-lucky unicorns seem to dwell, but it can definitely change for the better. <br /><br />It may open the doors of perception just enough to catch a glimpse of the endless possibilities that lie beyond.<br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/cyril_helnwein/6387210901"><img alt="link to source" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GbKOTDuW60A/VZqoAFao7II/AAAAAAAABN0/oHL5zhbJjIM/s1600/rabbit-hole.jpg" title="link to source" /></a></div><br /><hr width="100%" /><div style="font-size: small; line-height: 1.5em !important;"><a name="1" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>1</b></a> Fun fact: when I was about 12, there was a girl in my class whose posture I would consciously study and try to emulate, because of how much more casual she looked when just standing around. The body of anthropological research some of us accumulate while still in elementary school can be mind-boggling. <a href="#top1" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /><a name="2" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>2</b></a> There's a great line in Infinite Jest that goes: "That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that <i>everyone else</i> is evil." And a bit further down: "That the people to be the most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened." I've been quite massively obsessed with Infinite Jest lately, which might explain the footnote-heaviness of this post. Another absolutely fantastic thing to check out is DFW's famous '<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI&amp;ab_channel=JamieSullivan" target="_blank">This is Water</a>' speech, which ties in nicely to everything this post is about, but from a different angle.<a href="#top2" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /><a name="3" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>3</b></a> Sadly, this did not make the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1dfGR9G768&amp;ab_channel=ideasaretoys" target="_blank">evening news</a>.<a href="#top3" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /><a name="4" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>4</b></a> I'm not linking to that shit. Google it, if you must. <a href="#top4" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /><a name="5" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>5</b></a> I might some day, but <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/03/meditation-mind-control.html" target="_blank">my mindfulness training hasn't quite reached this point yet</a>. <a href="#top5" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /><a name="6" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>6</b></a> If you are reading this, yes, I mean you, you wonderful freak :p <a href="#top6" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a></div>trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-70603275967249765532015-06-23T21:35:00.000+02:002015-08-30T12:32:27.169+02:00Fat Girl Running (Updated! Now includes long tangential story about shoes!)Can you see me?<br /><br />I'm kind of hard to miss. I'm the girl who shuffles by in tattered sweatpants, looking like she's about to keel over, breathing in ragged gasps.<br /><br />You know how they say that you should find a pace that still allows you to keep up a conversation? Yeah, for me, that's called walking. Anything faster will immediately result in the gulps and wheezes you're hearing now, and make all my blood rush right up to my steaming face. I'm not talking about your charming Southern belle type flush either. I'm talking the kind of splotchy purple people turn when they're being choked or drowned, and it will stay like that for at least an hour after I've already showered. There's nothing I can do about this.<br /><br />I'm fully aware of what I look like, which is why the struggle to get my butt out the door and face you all is a million times harder than what I'm doing now, meaning the real battle has already been fought and won about half an hour ago in the privacy of my own home. This thing you are witnessing now is in fact my victory lap.<br /><br />And even though after a couple of minutes my vision blurs so much it's amazing I'm still able to stick to this stupid path instead of wildly veering off-road into a meadow somewhere, I can see you, too.<br /><br />There's those of you who look so genuinely worried that every time we cross paths I make a mental note to make myself a T-shirt that says: "Honestly, I'm fine!" as I see you all preparing to call me an ambulance and going over what you remember from CPR in your head. I appreciate your concern, but I swear it isn't half as bad as it looks.<br /><br />There's the soccer moms who avert their gaze while silently thanking their stars they never let themselves get this out of hand. I get where you're coming from. You can totally feel good about yourself. I am happy to provide this service for you, while I secretly do, too.<br /><br />There's Russian crew-cut guy who always sticks to the grassy bank and stops every 50 yards or so to do push ups without vomiting even a little bit, and whom I secretly elected as my favorite because he hasn't looked at me even once, caught up as he is in his own Serious Business.<br /><br />Then there are those I affectionately term 'Them Gazelle Bitches' who manage to not even break a sweat as they bouncety-bounce past my line of vision achieving a perfect 50/50 split between horizontal and vertical motion while still able to spare the energy to smirk at me as they go by, thereby proving that it is indeed possible to look superior while wearing orange spandex. I always wonder how smug they would look if they were forced to wear a 60 pound backpack of jiggly pudge, but I know I brought this on myself, and that's just fine.<br /><br />Personally, I try as hard as I can to keep any vertical motion to an absolute minimum, due to all the flab, and because I have this voice in my head that keeps telling me I don't deserve any fancy shit like a sports bra or proper running shoes until I've at least proven that I can finish this damn couch-to-5k program and the farthest I've ever gotten was about halfway in. And those shoes, no matter how much I still love them because they have naked ladies on them, admittedly have seen better days, and make whatever I'm doing look like shambling at the very best. But the point is that I'm doing it.<br /><br />And when I've finally put in my pathetic little circuit of 1 minute intervals, I get to walk home all proud and splotchy purple while listening to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKyrULAfvq8&amp;ab_channel=krodd24" target="_blank">Explosions in the Sky</a> and wallowing in fresh, free dopamine <i>that I made with my own brain</i>, added to the rush of getting to tell myself that <i>I did it! I really did it!</i> and I feel absolutely fucking invincible.<br /><br />So you can all suck it.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FHOOXkE3b9I/VYajvWqEHaI/AAAAAAAABNk/UJC0znCdgwI/s1600/shoes.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">These have seen better days. And by that I mean the 90's.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><hr width="100%" /><div style="font-size: small; line-height: 1.5em !important;">* If any of you are at all aware of the <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/39l35d/recap_the_fattening/">fat shaming wars</a> that have been happening on Reddit recently, you can consider this my two cents. And you don't absolutely have to suck it if you don't want to. :)<br /></div><br /><hr width="100%" />Update: I ended up deciding to listen to all you lovely people and your worries, so I went out and got myself a sports bra (fun fact: this post actually earned me a Google search result for "make your own sports bra" - how about no?). The shoes were a birthday gift from the boyfriend.<br />Not so fun fact: there were only about three pairs that were recommended for women over 75kg (I suppose <i>nobody</i> wants to see fat girls running), and these were the <i>least</i> pink ones. Are we supposed to assume that the heavier girls get, the more they aspire to be Disney princesses? Because I can assure you that I don't. Oh and the sports bra might come in handy when I finally decide to try that auto-asphyxiation thing all the kids are talking about these days. Because, you know, orgasms.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Y-URyRjeQbA/Va4l9M3GqyI/AAAAAAAABOc/_v8ks_gJD8U/s1600/new-shoes.jpg" /></div><br /><hr width="100%" />Update 2: Yeah... I think I may just stick with the old Kappas for now...<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qzdEf0d8c0U/VbEngpjjdWI/AAAAAAAABPA/TyO87nOD5aU/s1600/feet1.jpg" /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OWOMdVocYLE/VbEnnYxx0II/AAAAAAAABPI/10Sfn7m_UwQ/s1600/feet2.jpg" /></div><br /><hr width="100%" />Update 3: So I superglued my old sneakers anywhere the soles were coming off and went for another run in them today. My feet are happy. <s>The end.<br />PS: Anybody want to buy some shoes? They're only a little bit pink...</s><br /><br /><hr width="100%" />Update 4: So! After some minor harassment, the store where I bought the evil murdershoes let me exchange them after all!<br />Now I am the proud owner of what may just be the ugliest shoes ever created by man:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3Mo2LkbLpGU/VeLXrsFsy4I/AAAAAAAABPw/E_1S2bs-VNE/s1600/ugly-shoes.jpg" /></div><br />But they don't destroy my feet, and I also could never stay mad at anything that makes this face at me:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-E4GwL6_sEfY/VeLYAsyz-OI/AAAAAAAABP4/arjb_QUS1lk/s1600/run-pliz.jpg" /></div><br />The end.trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-45748802189415082462015-06-09T12:03:00.000+02:002015-06-09T12:03:16.361+02:00Things I will say on my last day in customer service"Yes, extremely pregnant lady, this is what your couch looks like. It is indeed quite large. You may have been under the impression that it was inflatable. I will have to disappoint you there. It is the same size as it was in the showroom, only now it is inside a box. No I can not put it in your car. I am a fairly small person with ridiculously weak arms, and that is a three seat sofa that will probably not even fit in whatever car you drive, unless you came in a pick up truck. Yes, I am aware that you are extremely pregnant. I know our checkout lines can be long, but I think it's fair of me to guess that you were probably already in this condition fifteen minutes ago when you decided to impulse buy a couch and then refused to have it delivered."<br /><br />"Yes, person who, when I call the next number in line, insists on shouting their own number back at me, you clearly exist. You don't just exist, though, you&nbsp;fascinate&nbsp;the hell out of me. I've always wanted to ask you what you'll think to accomplish by doing that. And there are more than one of you, so clearly&nbsp;it's&nbsp;something I ought to understand. Is it, that you think I'm wrong? Because I can assure you that the number I'm calling is the next number in line. I have&nbsp;<i>equipment&nbsp;</i>for that. Or do you think that, because you are obviously more important than all the other people who are waiting and I hadn't noticed you, by shouting your own number I will realize and then correct my mistake, so that it will suddenly be your turn after all? Sadly this is not how the numbers game works. I am sorry."<br /><br />"Yes, adult woman who is standing in the middle of the area that says 'employees only past this point' tapping her foot and rolling her eyes like a cartoon character, I acknowledge you. I already acknowledged you ten minutes ago when I apologized for our waiting times, explained that we are understaffed and doing the best we can, and promised to keep a special eye out for your order to come through. Apparently it was foolish of me to assume this interaction would have any kind of effect on what you insist on continuing to do. Maybe these actions will, in fact, work as a magic spell to make all the other customers (you can't see them, because they are behind you in the area where customers are supposed to actually be) suddenly disappear in a Wizard of Oz type fashion. Please just carry on doing that."<br /><br />"Sorry, I do not know where you can find this mystery item you are looking for, even if you were so helpful to specify that "it's white, but it comes in other colors" and is also "kind of square" and made out of "some kind of wood, but maybe not real wood". Maybe if you waited in line like everyone else instead of assaulting me with your "quick, simple question" while I'm helping somebody else, I can look it up on the computer, but even then, you are going to have to be a teensy bit more specific. Yes, I understand this is frustrating for you and I am probably very stupid for not being able to answer your question. You know who would be able to answer your question? A robot. Do you want retail workers to be replaced by robots? Don't answer that."<br /><br />"Sorry, extremely drunk lady yelling incoherently, I understand that the road to get over here can be very dangerous during rush hour. I apologize. I do feel that I should point out that we didn't put it there though; that was the city's doing. Still, I understand that this is, of course, somehow my fault. I do, however, imagine that it might be somewhat less dangerous if you weren't falling down drunk at 5 pm on a Wednesday."<br /><br />And to anyone who asks to speak to a manager I will say that <i>I am</i> the manager, after which I will continue to answer all questions through interpretive dance.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--xC4fhpguXA/VICQAT44GHI/AAAAAAAAA7c/GZF01PCcA3w/s640/dance.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" width="412" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I did not make this meme. Please don't sue me.</td></tr></tbody></table>trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-9621832465562120692015-05-26T11:07:00.000+02:002015-05-26T11:22:10.256+02:00Purify pt. 3: Epicurus and Satan<hr /><div style="font-size: small;">This is part 3 in a series of posts about addiction. <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/04/happiness-fishbowl.html" target="_blank">Read part 1</a> - <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/05/look-at-flowers.html" target="_blank">Read part 2</a></div><hr /><br />If you happened to live in Athens in 307 B.C. and were taking an evening stroll, it was possible to stumble upon a particular garden entrance that bore the following inscription:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure."</blockquote>If you were the adventurous type and did indeed tarry, you would meet here the epicureans: a motley crew of men and women, slaves and freemen who had dedicated their lives to <s>being epic</s><a href="#1" name="top1" style="font-size:small"><sup>1</sup></a> the pursuit of pleasure.<br /><br />Being one of the world's first hippie communes to include women as a rule, rather than an exception, it is easy to imagine the scandal this presented for regular Athenians who were, like virtually every other spiritual denomination to this day, convinced that to be moral, man had to pursue asceticism. Even easier to imagine would be the regular Athenians' opinions of what sort of thing went on inside those garden walls.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img alt="Well, doesn't that look like a fun time?" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9-lZQZR8hEQ/VWM1yICf3CI/AAAAAAAABNU/tvwGyMlxRmw/s1600/greek-orgy.png" title="Well, doesn't that look like a fun time?" /></div><br /><br />It's funny how little our moral inclinations towards this sort of stuff have changed. Communes of this sort may no longer raise much of an eyebrow, but deep down we can't seem to shake the feeling that indulgence = bad, and what was once called pleasure houses can still be found at the seedy end of town. On the other hand, we have perfected the pursuit of pleasure to such an art form as to have at our disposal such things as Netflix marathons and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-fried_Mars_bar" target="_blank">deep fried mars bar</a>. While Epicurus once wrote a letter asking his friend for some good cheese, so he could have "a feast" whenever he wanted, it's hard to imagine what his thoughts would have been on the <a href="http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2014-03-26/0326_waffle_taco_970-630x420.jpg" target="_blank">Taco Bell Waffle Taco</a> or the <a href="http://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/assets/images/Menu-Import/CCF_RedVelvetCheesecake.jpg" target="_blank">Ultimate Red Velvet Cake Cheesecake</a>.<br /><br />The thing that's changed the most for us humans living in the 21st century where pleasure is concerned, is the free availability of substances that directly impact the reward center of our brain. Loads of things in our environment today have been specifically designed to be addictive. Designed by Breaking Bad-style chemists who probably would have cured cancer ages ago if they weren't all deployed by Unilever to invent the definitive mind blowing potato chip. The science that has been invested in silly things like instant pudding and crackers is absolutely mind-boggling.<a href="#2" name="top2" style="font-size:small"><sup>2</sup></a> It's no wonder this stuff is so hard to resist; close to a century of food science has perfected it to be just that.<br /><br />As we're being bombarded with so many stimuli that were scientifically designed to far exceed anything that can be found in nature, it's no surprise people everywhere are battling addictions of various kinds. Our brains are simply not equipped to handle anything this powerful.<br />I think Satan explains it pretty well here:<br /><br /><div class="videoWrapper"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="510" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ML2aQTn_1Ao" width="854"></iframe><br /></div><br />And yet, the pull of purification and self-denial is as present as it ever was, judging from the popularity of various "detoxing" practices. This pull may not always be spiritual, but it's still rare for a human to live past 20 and not learn the hard lesson that excessive hedonism can only lead to <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/04/happiness-fishbowl.html"target="_blank">bad times</a>. This leaves us with a pretty schizophrenic attitude towards pleasure in general. We long to indulge, but at the same time feel we're "being naughty" when we do, and then go on to punish ourselves by abstaining. The constant back and forth between the allure of our environment and the ideal of purification has done nothing but create a sort of collective bulimia, where anyone unable to withstand temptation (drunks, fat people, smokers, etc.) has to face not only their own addiction but also the contempt of general society who somehow still turns this into a moral failing, supplementing their addiction with shame. Even Satan, the prince of temptation, has to admit defeat when he concedes that the only way to avoid addiction is to never enjoy anything anymore.<br /><br />Yet it shouldn't have to be that way. To see where we, and Satan, are wrong, we have only to return to that Athenian garden and talk to its owner, that vigorous defender of pleasure as the only true purpose in life. We'd find that instead of wine, he drank only water, and instead of a <a href="http://www.trbimg.com/img-53ea4a71/turbine/redeye-do-rite-donut-fried-chicken-sandwich-20140813" target="_blank">Fried Chicken Donut Sandwich</a><a href="#3" name="top3" style="font-size:small"><sup>3</sup></a>, he didn't even eat meat. In fact, we'd find this self-declared garden of pleasure quite devoid of decadence after all!<br />But Epicurus was no cheat. He really did think that pleasure was the highest virtue, even declaring that moral principles were meaningless if they did not have pleasure as their goal. The thing he had found, though, was that after rational consideration, the best way to make life pleasurable was to avoid excessive consumption, and lead a life of moderation in the company of others. This might not seem instinctively true, but where something as important as pleasure was concerned, we ought not trust our base instincts with our decisions. Only the most rigorous rational analysis would do. If we applied that, we would find that the way of moderation would undeniably be the most pleasurable in the long run. There were three things, in Epicurus' opinion, one could never have enough of, and in which he indulged freely. Those things were friendship, freedom (understood as self-sufficiency), and philosophical thought.<br /><br />I often imagine how easy it must have been for the epicureans to adhere to these findings, living in their little garden without PlayStation or WiFi. But if I apply my own rational thought, there is no doubt in my mind that he had the right idea. It's just a lot harder for us. But I've found that if I tell myself that instead of denying myself pleasure, I'm actually pursuing pleasure in the epicurean sense, it becomes a whole lot easier to forego that extra slice of cake.<br /><br />...<br /><br />Well, sometimes it does.<br /><br /><hr width="100%" /><div style="font-size: small; line-height: 1.5em !important;"><a name="1" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>1 </b></a>I apologize. <a href="#top1" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /><a name="2" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>2 </b></a>For anyone interested in going down this rabbit hole, I cannot recommend enough the (Pulitzer-prize winning) book 'Salt Sugar Fat' by Michael Moss. If you only want to dip in your toes, you can read <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?action=click&contentCollection=Books&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article"target="_blank">a pretty amazing excerpt</a> over at The New York Times Magazine. <a href="#top2" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /><a name="3" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>3 </b></a>I couldn't resist sneaking another one in there :p <a href="#top3" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /></div>trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-58392857853717253092015-05-12T16:51:00.000+02:002015-11-10T17:04:20.436+01:00Purify pt. 2: Look at the flowers<hr /><div style="font-size: small;">This is part 2 in a series of posts about addiction. <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/04/happiness-fishbowl.html" target="_blank">Read part 1</a> - <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/05/purify-pt-3-epicurus-and-satan.html"target="_blank">Read part 3</a></div><hr /><br />I promised you all last time that I was going to disclose my method for overcoming addiction. I'll tell you now, and all you have to do is sign up for my 100% free, incredibly non-spammy newsletter and download my e-book.<br /><br />Ha. If you're still reading: I'm kidding. I crack myself up.<br /><br />There's two parts to tackling any addiction, and the first part is to stop doing the thing.<br />If you feel like slapping me now, you can go right ahead, but I'd like to remind you that I already told you it sucked. And it is going to suck for a while, depending on where you are and what you are dealing with. There is just no way around that.<br /><br />The second part is to look at the flowers. I'll tell you a story about that one.<br /><br />There is an in-joke I share with one of my all time favorite people that has been around for almost ten years, so there's no saying how excited I was when it got referenced on last season's The Walking Dead - by super-badass, <i>"None of these are problems"&nbsp;</i>Carol, no less!<br />It originated during a very dark time, when I was struggling very hard to get my happiness awareness threshold back into the general vicinity of the fishbowl. (If this makes absolutely no sense to you, you can go and read&nbsp;<a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/04/happiness-fishbowl.html" target="_blank">this</a> post, and I promise you it will be a lot less confusing. I can make no promises beyond the extend of this one sentence, though. Anything else you are still confused about is an entirely separate problem we'll have to work through at a different time.)<br />It was so far out of the sight of the fishbowl, in fact, that at some point during a conversation, I ended up asking her, and not even in a self-pitying way but very matter-of-factly, what the fuck I was supposed to enjoy now. Her answer? She said she enjoyed looking at the flowers in her garden. This was the exact point I figured I may as well just fucking kill myself, because that was the most depressing thing I'd ever heard.<br /><br />If this isn't funny to you, by the way, I am afraid I'm unable to explain why this is still hysterical to us nearly ten years later, and keeps inspiring exchanges like: "How've you been?" - "Well, I'm enjoying the flowers." - "That bad huh?". All I can say is that if it weren't for the ability to laugh at misery, an awful lot of us probably wouldn't be here.<br /><br />Of course the reason why we can laugh at this a little harder each year is that one way in which people and their brains are so absolutely amazing is their ability to adapt and heal themselves. If you wait long enough, no matter how far outside the fishbowl you are, there will come a time when you are able to enjoy the flowers again.<br /><br />So much for the good news. The bad news is that, until you get there, things will suck. They will suck massively, because no matter where you are, you have a gap to bridge and there is a whole lot of nothing between looking at flowers and sprinkling MDMA on your ice cream sundae (not that anyone ever conceived of such a thing).<br /><br />The other thing that is absolutely true is that they won't suck forever.<br /><br />It's just very, very hard to keep telling ourselves this, because we are all exceptionally bad at predicting how something will make us feel in the long run. This is why it's so hard to convince ourselves time and time again that the instantly gratifying thing isn't the thing we really want. We can rationalize all we want, but it still <i>feels </i>like a lie. Hell, I can't remember there ever having been a time when I've come back from a run and thought "Man, that was a dumb idea, I feel all icky and gross now". The only times I've ever had this experience was after sitting on my ass and binging on sugar all night. And yet whenever I feel like I need a pick-me-up, what do you think my brain is going to believe is the absolute best idea ever?<br /><br />In this way I am exactly the same as my cat who whines to be let outside, whines to be let inside 5 seconds later, and then promptly forgets that the outside sucks and wants to be let outside again. I can mock her all I want, but there are areas of my life where I am not one iota better, and her brain is the size of a satsuma. What's my excuse?<br /><br />There are tricks you can apply to get you through the bad times, and this is one of the territories where mindfulness proves useful. What I call 'looking at the flowers', is in fact something called 'urge surfing', which in turn isn't something that is exclusive to mindfulness. Because mindfulness is, aside from a buzzword, nothing more than an amalgam of meditation-related practices that seem to work, urge surfing is just one of these things they added to their arsenal.<br /><br />What it comes down to is that whenever you feel the urge to engage in a behavior you would like to stop, you make a mental note of this urge and then postpone your reaction, even if it's just for a couple of minutes. What you'll find, is that the urge is something that ebbs away naturally. When your urge is at its highest, this may be hard to conceive, but it has been established for example that the urge to smoke usually only take about 20 minutes to ebb to a more bearable level.<br /><br />What mindfulness teaches, is to meditate through this. You go to a place where you can be alone for a little while, feel the urge, and breathe. Explore how it feels to not engage. Note that you are at this moment living with the feeling you have. Can you prolong this for 5 more minutes? Maybe 10?<br />In mindfulness therapy they call this 'sitting with the feeling', which is just a weird ass way of telling you to sit somewhere and feel that way. What you are in fact doing is very actively accepting what is true for you in this moment. If after a while, the feeling gets better, you have just surfed your way past an urge. If it doesn't, you have at least taught yourself that it was possible to feel whatever you felt and not react to it.<br /><br />I've read others' suggestions of distracting yourself by doing something like taking a shower or going for a walk, and then returning to assess the urge. While these are valid methods, I've found they don't work as well for me, because this way I am still teaching myself that an urge, or an intense emotion, is something I need to respond to right away by doing something. What seems to work for me is to keep myself very still, and to look at the flowers.<br /><br />We are all stronger than we think we are. There is a massive amount of suck we can take and still be ok in the long run. Looking at the flowers is a way to accept that, and remind yourself that if you just keep looking, things won't suck forever. As long as you keep looking at those stupid flowers and hang on, there will come a time when they won't seem so stupid after all. There will come a time when you will see flowers, and smile.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mhjFV70oZDI/VVC5YLgRgzI/AAAAAAAABNE/pswkDQy9Qe8/s1600/look-at-the-flowers.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Look at the flowers, Lizzie." Yeah, you're fucked.</td></tr></tbody></table><br />PS: There is <a href="http://depts.washington.edu/abrc/mbrp/recordings/Urge%20Surfing.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a free mp3</a> online that you can use for urge surfing, and tons of other resources about the general principle. But I'm sure you can find those yourself. I mean, you seem to be a pretty resourceful person.<br /><br /><hr /><div style="font-size: small;text-align:center"><a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/04/happiness-fishbowl.html" target="_blank">Read part 1</a> - <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/05/purify-pt-3-epicurus-and-satan.html"target="_blank">Read part 3</a></div>trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-4843961633526333792015-04-28T16:32:00.000+02:002015-05-26T11:31:26.434+02:00Purify pt.1: The happiness fishbowlWhen I wrote <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/03/i-renounce-fish.html" target="_blank">my obsessions post</a>, I should have made it more clear that when I'm talking about obsessions, I don't mean addictions.<br /><br />I wasn't planning on writing more about addictions after I did <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2014/12/addiction.html" target="_blank">that one post</a> on them, because this blog is supposed to be about things I suck at, and addictions are one of those rare things I excel at without equal. I mean that. Give me something, anything, and I'll turn it into an addiction right before your eyes. I was even accused once, at the tender age of ten (in my mom's patented thundering doom voice) of being addicted to <i>Granny Smith apples</i>.<br /><br />In spite of that, I'm all about sharing my experience if it might help other people to suck less at stuff, so at the risk of ruining the concept of my blog, I'll share what I know. Hell, I'm even turning it into a series, because why not. This first part will mainly be about how addictions aren't the same as obsessions, why they suck so much, and also about fish.<br /><br />On to the clarification then. The way I see it, obsessions are things that feed you, expand your field of interests, and generally open your world to new kinds of enjoyment. Maybe they'll inspire you to undertake creative endeavors of your own. Yes, even if it's just "fan art". Lord knows I've written enough slash fiction in my life to forego my right to look down on that even a little bit. I'm talking about things like cosplay and GOT dinner parties. You know, fun. I used to be massively obsessed with modding The Sims, which (among other things) ended up earning me enough knowledge about 3-D modelling software to enable me to design and build my own non-virtual furniture. Neat!<br />Obsessions are also subject to sudden and fickle change ("<a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/03/i-renounce-fish.html" target="_blank">Done with fish.</a>"). Just like addictions, they can lie dormant for years, but unlike addictions, you can usually choose whether or not you want to rekindle them when the impulse arises. As I've argued <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/03/i-renounce-fish.html" target="_blank">before</a>, they also tend to make people a lot less boring, but that may just be my personal taste.<a href="#1" name="top1" style="text-decoration:none !important">*</a><br /><br />Addictions, on the other hand, work in the exact opposite direction. They narrow your perception down to a very claustrophobic state (as when you're walking around outside after playing Fallout for 18 hours and you have to suppress the urge to pick up every piece of trash to stash it back at your lair), and rob you of your ability to enjoy much of anything else. And instead of suddenly growing bored and moving on to other things, you're pretty much stuck with them.<br /><br />The funny thing is, aside from substances that directly target the pleasure center of your brain (more on those later), people can vary greatly in the things they get addicted to. All that seems to be needed is that it is a thing that is pleasurable and that we can habitually seek out. Anything goes, from gaming to casual sex or buying shoes. It's not the thing itself that ends up mattering, but the way in which we become adapted to it.<br /><br />Because our brain is only good at noticing change, anything that earns us an increase in happiness only manages to do so for a brief period of time, after which we get bored with it and move on to different things. (There's <a href="http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/life-is-picture-but-you-live-in-pixel.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a great post</a> about this over at WaitButWhy.) That's fine though, because there are tons of things in the world that have the potential of making us happy.<br /><br />The problem with addictions is that, instead of becoming disinterested after a while, we only become more fixated on this single thing which then seems to somehow raise the bar for anything else to register as a happy making thing at all.<br /><br />I even made a graph about this, which as far as I understand it, should do wonders for my presence on Pinterest.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GLwWxyHgN5I/VS5gi8kN31I/AAAAAAAABMY/E9QNiT3VA0U/s1600/happiness-chart.png" /></div><br />What I'm trying to get across is that for anyone who is addicted to anything, the addiction screws up their ability to enjoy anything that falls below the happiness threshold as dictated by the thing they are addicted to. I picked nicotine as an example because it is the one I personally struggle with the most, but the fun part is that anything you can think of could be put in its place and ruin your enjoyment of the things below the line. Where a normal person's happiness threshold would be somewhere between "sunny day" and "having fingers", to anyone who is addicted to nicotine, none of that bottom stuff would even register as long as they are lacking their fix. If you are addicted to anything serious, you're shit out of luck, because your happiness threshold isn't even on this graph.<br /><br />I know this isn't a very good graph. I don't even know why time is a dimension, and it makes it seem as though having fingers is just a momentary thing to enjoy before it is gone forever. Basically, I suck at graphs.<br /><br />I was lying awake at 3 am last night thinking about this, and figured it would make a lot more sense if I drew it as a fishbowl...<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" title="I used to be an adventurer like you. Now I'm a fucking fish." alt="I used to be an adventurer like you. Now I'm a fucking fish."src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rteXXztXPis/VS5h5OY_EsI/AAAAAAAABMk/ZLTCbYyatYU/s1600/happiness-fishbowl.png" /></div><br />But now I'm not so sure anymore. I mean, it certainly <i>seems</i> more accurate (The nicotine fish is <i>dead!</i> The drug fish <i>isn't even in the bowl, man!</i> The sex fish... seems happy.) but now I'm worried that all I did was drop all scientific pretense and replace it with weird symbolism while also inadvertently illustrating the main difference between analytic and continental philosophy and completely losing sight of what I was going to talk about.<br /><br />I can already tell this was an excellent idea.<br /><br />Anyway! Obviously, the only way to reclaim the fun in your life is to re-learn to enjoy what's in the fishbowl below the water. So far, I've found only one way to successfully achieve that, and that's what the next post will be about. I can already give you a spoiler though: it sucks donkey balls!<br /><br />Until then, I'd love to know about all of your obsessions and addictions. If anyone can beat Granny Smith apples, they get a cherry.<br /><br /><hr width="100%" /><div style="font-size: small; line-height: 1.5em !important;"><a name="1" style="text-decoration: none !important;"><b>*</b></a>All of this is of course very much based on personal experience, and should the <i>freaking fishbowl</i> not have tipped you off: there's absolutely nothing scientific about any of this.<a href="#top1" style="text-decoration: none !important;">↩</a><br /></div><hr /><div style="font-size: small;text-align:center"><a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/05/look-at-flowers.html"target="_blank">Read part 2</a> - <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/05/purify-pt-3-epicurus-and-satan.html""target="_blank">Read part 3</a></div>trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-65583277266481862532015-04-17T12:27:00.000+02:002015-04-17T23:18:22.039+02:00Please tell me sweating is an emotion.This is just a quick post to tide you over as I'm working on a series about addiction, Satan, The Walking Dead and <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/03/i-renounce-fish.html" target="_blank">fish</a> again for some reason. I was going to post the first installment today, but then figured that I'm long overdue on an update about <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/03/meditation-mind-control.html">the mindfulness class I'm taking and am not supposed to talk about</a>, so I figured I'd fill you in on that first.<br /><br />It's actually surprisingly useful. I've learned a bunch of stuff I'll probably write about later as I figure out how to apply it better in daily life, along with some surprising facts about myself, the latest of which is that I've been feeling my emotions wrong my entire life and am probably a robot.<br />Yes. It came as quite a shock to me, too.<br /><br />The way I figured this out is that, for a while now, as we've been talking about emotions during class, people keep asking me "Where do you feel this in your body?" and every time I'm perplexed, because while I'm perfectly aware of what I'm <i>feeling</i>, apparently I never <i>feel </i>anything anywhere.<br /><i>I don't know how to answer this question.</i><br />Meanwhile people around me are describing bodily sensations with the lyrical proficiency of 19th century poets.<br /><br />Our homework for this week is to fill in this roster every time something happens that makes us feel something, and trying to do this is making me feel, um, like whatever it must feel like to suddenly discover that you're color blind. It's not something you feel in your body. It's something you sort of just know, okay?<br /><br /><div style="margin-left: 10%;">WHAT ARE YOU FEELING?<br />Well, I'm pissed off.<br /><br />WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS?<br />I'm thinking people are assholes.<br /><br />WHERE DO YOU FEEL THIS IN YOUR BODY?<br />... Uh... in my brain?</div><br />Okay, let's try another one:<br /><br /><div style="margin-left: 10%;">WHAT ARE YOU FEELING?<br />Easy: I'm bored.<br /><br />WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS?<br />I'm thinking this is boring.<br /><br />WHERE DO YOU FEEL THIS IN YOUR BODY?<br />... You're kidding me, right?</div><br />The worst of it is that I can't just write this off as being some stupid hippie crap, because every time I bring this up with friends and other normal people, they're all like: "Of course you feel your feelings in your body, <i>dummy!</i> You get sort of tight in your chest, or in your throat, or you get a knot in your stomach."<br /><br />...<br /><br />But those are <i>metaphors</i>, right? Are you telling me that everyone is continually experiencing what I always thought was just a literary device? Wait... you mean there are actually people who sometimes literally feel like there are butterflies in their stomachs? How freaking upsetting must that be? I'm fairly certain I'd call an ambulance.<br /><br />All this is pointing to only one logical conclusion, which is that, yes, I <i>am </i>a robot, because what I've come to know as 'feeling emotions' is apparently just receiving information, and on top of that I'm calibrated awfully badly, because the only emotion my body seems to know how to do is "chased by invisible bears", which is probably why it likes to show this off at random intervals during the day.<br /><br />Oh, and crying. Crying is an emotion, right?<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZoE8v4LuUeM/VTDbY0h2PyI/AAAAAAAABM0/E6qDjuK8ohw/s1600/troy-barnes-emotions.gif" /></div>trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-83041949570598382722015-03-31T12:41:00.000+02:002017-08-18T12:59:48.543+02:00It's turtles all the way down.One of the most annoying concepts in philosophy is that of the infinite regress. You might run into it in various contexts, but the most common one to come across it is basic causality.<br /><br />It goes like this: if we accept that everything has a cause, and we trace that causal chain back to the beginning of time when nothing existed, what was there to cause anything? Here someone might pop in and say: "Easy! God." Then someone else might ask: "Well, what caused God, then?"<br /><br />"Well, duh," the first person will say, "God caused himself because God knows how to do that," to which the second person's head will implode, but they won't say anything because the alternative would be for the cause-and-effect chain to go on into infinity, and the idea of accepting an infinite regress is even more embarrassing to a philosopher than using God as a cop-out and at this point they wish they just hadn't bothered with the conversation.<br /><br />An infinite regress isn't just embarrassing on a philosophical level, it's also a pretty nasty thing to fall into on a daily basis. I know, because for some reason it's the first place my obnoxious brain decides to go when I try to teach it something about perspective.<br /><br />Perspective is all, you see. In an ideal world, you'd be in perfect control of the perspective you take on any given situation. It's about how zoomed-in you want to be on what's going on.<br />For instance, if you're having a movie night with friends, in order to be able to enjoy yourself you'll want to be pretty zoomed in on the context at hand, and not hovering on the outskirts of the earth, pondering how messed up it is that you're this bunch of organic life forms who choose to lock themselves inside a box, surrounded by millions of other boxes, to sit side by side looking at other organic life forms sitting in various sorts of boxes... in a box! (I broke a therapist once by pointing this out. She was quiet for a long time and then said "So you'd like to have a better relationship with your friends?")<br /><br />On the other hand, when something truly awful happens, you pretty much want to be as detached as possible, happily remembering the fact that in a couple of years time, none of this will matter and you'll both be sporadically looking each other up on facebook while wondering what on earth possessed you to even see anything in the other person. <br /><br />In cognitive behavioral therapy, they call this 'reframing'. It's a pretty good idea, were it not that every time I try to reframe something, it's as if my brain slips on a banana peel and slides straight into an infinite regress. Like so:<br /><br /><div style="margin-left: 5%;;"><table><tr><td style="vertical-align: text-top;text-align:right;word-wrap: normal !important;width:100px;">Brain:&nbsp&nbsp</td> <td>What the fuck is happening to your bangs today? You've been messing around with them for twenty minutes and they still look like a comb-over. Why do you even have bangs anyway? Are we pretending it is 1985? Everyone you meet today will throw up in their mouth a little.<br /><br /></td></tr><tr><td style="vertical-align: text-top;text-align:right">Me:&nbsp&nbsp</td> <td>This sounds like a task for... reframing girl! Ok brain, listen up: what my bangs look like is totally insignificant, because hair is an incredibly superficial thing to be hung up about, and most people won't even care what I look like because they are way too caught up in themselves to even notice.<br /><br /></td></tr><td style="vertical-align: text-top;text-align:right">Brain:&nbsp&nbsp</td> <td>Good point. I mean, if you think about it, in just a couple of years, everyone who has ever seen your hair will be dead.<br /><br /></td></tr><tr><td style="vertical-align: text-top;text-align:right">Me:&nbsp&nbsp</td> <td>...<br /><br /></td></tr><td style="vertical-align: text-top;text-align:right">Brain:&nbsp&nbsp</td> <td>And then a little while later, the sun will explode, swallow the earth, and no-one in this galaxy will ever have hair again. Probably. You know, never say never.<br /><br /></td></tr><tr><td style="vertical-align: text-top;text-align:right">Me:&nbsp&nbsp</td> <td>:((((</td></tr></table></div><br />Or, if you want to go the other way around:<br /><br /><div style="margin-left: 5%;"><table><tr><td style="vertical-align: text-top;text-align:right;word-wrap: normal !important;width:100px;">Brain:&nbsp&nbsp</td> <td>Well this is an incredibly boring conversation. Why are you even talking to this person? Neither of you has any importance whatsoever in the grander scheme of things!<br /><br /></td></tr><tr><td style="vertical-align: text-top;text-align:right">Me:&nbsp&nbsp</td> <td>You know, brain, just the fact that we are both alive right now, in this space and time, is pretty amazing. Just think of all the mind-blowing coincidences that had to happen for the two of us to share this same physical plane! Doesn't that count for something? Create a bond?<br /><br /></td></tr><td style="vertical-align: text-top;text-align:right">Brain:&nbsp&nbsp</td> <td>You know what, that IS amazing. And to think that you are both made out of the exact same stuff as this table, or the wall, or that bottle of water, just oscillating in different configurations with a ton of empty space in between...<br /><br /></td></tr><tr><td style="vertical-align: text-top;text-align:right">Me:&nbsp&nbsp</td> <td>...<br /><br /></td></tr><td style="vertical-align: text-top;text-align:right">Brain:&nbsp&nbsp</td> <td>You know, from what little I understand about quantum physics, I gather there is at least a small chance that if you pick just the right moment, you can pretty much just put your hand through their face without them noticing.<br /><br /></td></tr><tr><td style="vertical-align: text-top;text-align:right">Me:&nbsp&nbsp</td> <td>:((((</td></tr></table></div><br /><br />I'm not entirely sure how to end this post, but that's fine, because there is an infinite number of parallel universes in which I am, and am also made entirely out of bubble wrap.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img alt="What do you MEAN I have to put pants on? Have you even HEARD of the Fermi paradox? " border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wr8XzVmu0hM/VRaQRjQwrFI/AAAAAAAABL8/nSeyNi2VZZ8/s1600/bathroom.jpg" title="What do you MEAN I have to put pants on? Have you even HEARD of the Fermi paradox? " /></div>trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-29793778832821139292015-03-24T17:44:00.001+01:002015-11-10T17:04:20.420+01:00On saying yes (Mistakes We Knew We Were Making)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jepoirrier/8319130269/in/photolist-dF8HAv-756VYe-756VLv-75aPvh-i5rHd6-i5skc8-75aNU1-75aP5W-ieA1n-756WbR-756VSX-bBHyJ3-5ACqMV-9pqWRQ-9UFC1L-65Rrzy-i5rHqa-i5rJMY-5n1bTj-5zLenr-7CBXCG-47ADcd-5ACqH4-6K8V1V-9D7tAm-2mDbo-prRQ2-756WfT-w48R3-946CoH-7nAuor-prQF8-99SRYJ-ecoSLm-9D4zue-csmtB-vFFRu-9RLiXD-QXskp-5ztCuX-5zsd2h-b4Vro-bpKDX-QWksx-9RPdVf-QWksg-dUBeJ1-bSBwup-873j9U-5zSxwb" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="by Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier on Flickr" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uhr4GXZut68/VRGWPMnDYkI/AAAAAAAABLo/UcebVRKK8w8/s1600/yes.jpg" title="by Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier on Flickr" /></a></div>Hey, <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/01/huh-and-yay.html" target="_blank">remember</a> when I was all excited about getting to meet Dave Eggers? Yeah, that didn't happen.<br />It didn't happen for reasons that were stupid and missing it didn't have any sort of lasting impact on my life (my favorite quote these days is Carol on the Walking Dead saying "<a href="http://sanjamac.tumblr.com/post/113760828543/none-of-these-are-problems" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">None of these are problems.</a>"), but I wouldn't be me if the nonoccurrence of this event didn't lead me down a vast spiral of over-analysis and self-loathing. It's what I do best, and among my collection of great gifts that sadly can't be turned into any kind of lucrative venture. And sometimes going down that road does end up leading me to something I can use. What I've arrived at this time, lying discarded at the bottom of this spiral covered in rubble and years worth of dust, is the word "yes".<br /><br />I can't remember when or why I left it there. In fact, I didn't fully realize it was lost to me, but there it was, blinking at the light as it gazed up at me with its eternal naive optimism, never blaming me for anything, like a puppy that's never been beaten, never been buried beneath an avalanche of no's.<br /><br />I'm going to try and dust it off as best I can.<br /><br />I've been spending a lot of time with people who claim that they have difficulty saying "no" and would like to learn how. So many blog posts have been written about this. We have to learn and say "no" so we can carve out slices of time for ourselves, to recharge, to take care. The problem with being as high maintenance as some of us are, is that this act of taking care can turn into a full time job in itself, and by trying to perfect this, we end up smothering ourselves with love and using up all our energy to defend our comfort zone. We forget what it's like to say "yes".<br /><br />It's so easy to lose this word, especially for us anxiety folk with our long list of safety rituals. Those rituals are needed, and we have learned this the hard way. We have fought for them, explained them again and again to the people who we've chosen to allow inside our inner circle. Simple things like sleep and alone time can be matters of life and death to us. But our dedication to self-care can sometimes end up being just another thing that harms us. After a while we have so much wrapped around us to protect us from outside invasions that it becomes increasingly difficult for any "yes" to slip through the cracks. We reinforce the cracks, because we've had a lifetime of practice and commitment to that and with this practice comes automation and, if we can manage it, efficiency.<br /><br />Saying no becomes a reflex, and the things we might have said yes to glimmer in and out of existence way too fast for us to correct that, even after we realize that our reasons for saying no were stupid and might not even apply this time, no matter how well intended they were.<br /><br />Turning this around is an undertaking that's frightening but not as frightening as the thought of wasting away in a fortress of no's.<br /><br />I'm going to try and let my fortress crumble a bit, and save some of the energy I would have used to maintain it so it can be spent on other things. It might not be such a bad thing to allow some of the walls to crack. After all, they say that's how the light gets in.<br /><br /><br /><br />It also allows us to spend more time with the people who matter most to us, and who still manage, after all this time, to amend our stupid no's with a resounding "yes" of their own.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-iXc-B6S_4ds/VRGRzmsZjcI/AAAAAAAABLc/J5L5M8kCzs4/s1600/Dave-Eggers-signature.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thanks, Dave. I kyze we meet someday, too. :)</td></tr></tbody></table>trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-30467860909374363632015-03-11T10:08:00.000+01:002015-03-11T10:08:06.602+01:00I renounce fish<div style="color: #666666;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/caut/4261128806/in/photolist-5BfWBw-fW1Jsf-bCV8CT-7GgrKb-a9bK2L-82gamG-7uxp93-bCTRc8-4ZQ6SD-F8wa3-emjDNA-drjj3G-ncnuFQ-9MaCQe-ntVk6J-bq1Z8Q-36jjwa-5Fo5ej-5Q6Czh-drjniH-bu3ycR-fi2C9U-jqhdoJ-9VfHYK-2Trc7D-2gP5Bt-drjnSt-5bCNk8-5HPSPa-4fWNSf-eUgAM-5Q2nEr-drjtMs-7Ch4W-ehe2af-ehe8yC-ehb1RK-ehe1U1-ehgKeS-aMXxrc-9vp8ii-bdMf2-9yUhMN-fgved-fi1U2f-7osAqK-bKf7uK-81knEp-4ZUgVo-9kknKJ" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="original image by CAUT via flickr" border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-54ilG1VaRLU/VP89ez0xYpI/AAAAAAAABK8/ZvG3J_8GtsU/s1600/silhouette-fish.jpg" title="original image by CAUT via flickr" /></a></div><i><br /></i> <i>John Laroche: "Look, I'll tell you a story, all right? I once fell deeply, you know, profoundly in love with tropical fish. Had 60 goddamn fish tanks in my house. I skin dived to find just the right ones. Anisotremus virginicus, Holdacanthus ciliaris, Chaetodon capistratus. You name it. Then one day I say, "fuck fish". I renounce fish. I vow never to set foot in that ocean again. That's how much "fuck fish". That was 17 years ago and I have never stuck so much as a toe in that ocean. And I love the ocean." <br />Susan Orlean: "But why?" <br />John Laroche: "Done with fish."<br /></i><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><i>Adaptation (2002)</i></div></div><br />I've been rekindling some of my old obsessions recently, and I must say it has been an altogether wonderful experience. Mainly because in the throes of depression, it's pretty much impossible for me to be obsessed with anything that is outside the twisted horrors of my own mind. To be able to feel this kind of intensely focused love for anything at all is a definite sign of recovery.<br /><br />I've always had them, obsessions, ever since I was old enough to grasp the concept of dinosaurs. I've gone through a long list of them between then and now, exchanging one for the other while some of them resurface unexpectedly like the old friends that they are. I don't know, maybe it's a genetic thing, because my youngest sister has just traveled 5000 miles to attend a party for Hobbit-fans and this makes me smile. If you are at all daunted by the insurmountability of genuine human interaction, obsessions are what helps you cope with life.<br /><br />They get a bad rep though, which is funny since the internet's self-help section is filled to the brim with talk of passion; find your passion, pursue your passion, live your passion. I find it to be a pretty arbitrary semantical divide, which seems to be mostly based on what we deem 'useful'. Someone who eats, lives and breathes architecture, we call passionate, yet someone who follows the lure of aSoIaF fandom all the way past the early stages of 'R+L=J' and into 'Benjen = Daario' and 'the trees drink human blood'-territory, we call obsessed.<br /><br />But obsessions are random by nature. We don't get to choose what knocks us off our feet. There's this stupid notion that everybody can "find their passion", and that this passion will also happen to be something they can make money from, but sadly this is bullshit. Some passions may allow you to make a career out of them, but the vast majority of them won't. That's no reason to relegate the latter to the sole confines of teenage bedrooms, because obsessions serve a higher purpose than that. They are what makes people come alive.<br /><br />There's this incredible line in the movie 'Adaptation' (which I quoted above, and is one of my all time favorites), uttered by Meryl Streep: <br /><br /><div style="color: #666666;">Susan Orlean: "I suppose I do have one unembarrassed passion. I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately."</div><br />I think this is just about the worst possible state of mind anyone can be in, and I've been there more than once. It tends to happen to me when I get too hung up on reality for long stretches of time, which then leads me down an infinite regress into nothingness.<br /><br />I'm not an opponent of reality, per se, but it can drag you down pretty hard if it is the only place you ever dwell. I'm one of those people who needs to cultivate some kind of private head space where the magic happens in order to survive. A place filled with dragons, dark romanticism and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpR4DbBDA_0">Ewan McGregor naked and covered in glitter</a>, to name a few. This is not how grownups are supposed to function, I guess, but I'm all in favor of what works these days. If your love for some story or concept or work of art can manage to enthrall you so completely that it helps you escape whatever dreary realities hold you captive, I think you should celebrate that. Bask in its glory.<br /><br />From a philosophical standpoint, I get that being obsessed with objects and concepts is very much inferior to the supposed holy grail that is intersubjectivity. But that last one is notoriously difficult to achieve, and if anything, our obsessions can help us to build bridges towards one another.<br />The evolution of human interaction in the internet age has been discussed to death and it bores me, but I will say that it's a whole lot easier to find people who share your passions than it once was. It also gives you a wonderful shortcut to cut through all the bullshit get to know you stuff and get straight to the good bits. Just think of how lonely those Bronies would have been if it wasn't for each other. We can all make fun of that, and then retreat to our boring everyday lives and have meaningless conversations about nothing.<br /><br />Stephen King once famously said that the one thing that makes characters fascinating are their obsessions, and I fully agree with him. An enamored mind can be a glorious thing. At a certain proximity, you can almost hear it buzzing with excitement at every new tidbit of collected knowledge. I like to be in the presence of it. Nothing pleases me more than to hear people talk about what makes them tick, even if it isn't what I'm down with. I don't care if it's entomology or space travel or whatever kind of mystical woo you are into. If it gets you off, I want to know.<br /><br />I want to know your dark side. I want to know what eats you, what gets you up in the morning and what haunts you in the middle of the night when you can't sleep. I want to know what makes you forget about the crushing meaninglessness of it all, about the unimaginable expansions of space and time that surround us, here, in this space and time because I happen to share this space and time with you and that is incredible. If that thing is God, well, fuck it, I want to know about God. And if that thing is the definitive extended Hobbit movie, I want to know about that.<br />If you'll tell me, I'll listen.<br /><br />Only then, will I ever renounce fish.<br /><br /><br /><hr />In other news:<br />"I bet there's porn for that."<br />(continuing the series of things best not said out loud during a mindfulness class)trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4051428892902567253.post-42371512291619880272015-03-02T18:19:00.000+01:002015-04-17T12:11:09.021+02:00Mindfulness: you're doing it right!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/21561428@N03/5042838782/in/photolist-8SAoJF-cjTgr3-ksNAPc-eeLXT1-5YhYsB-ifev7e-7hiEN1-7hiDwb-7heFmr-8FBShf-6xsqDL-8AACcx-eeLY5U-eeFeAM-eeFeyX-eeLXYJ-eeLXWU-eeLXUN-eeFepP-4th9xw-6xdAzL-6xdAxu-6x9rLH-6x9rJK-6x9rGZ-6x9rFr-6xdAnA-6xdAk7-6xdAfU-6xdAe3-6xdAbG-j6atQy-8ADGB9-8AABZR-8ADGkW-8AABGg-6xsqCU-op2Bab-op2fVq-op2fTw-oFfoSg-oFirnJ-oFujpw-oDuccG-oFvX7a-6xofJR-6xsqBW-ejmNP2-ejmNBX-ejswGQ" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="image by las - initially" border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-f8W4lfxzZe0/VPST0TFeNvI/AAAAAAAABKQ/arUSGSiShNM/s1600/spoon-bending.jpg" title="image by las - initially" /></a></div>Admit it, you've all done it. I most certainly have and if you tell me you haven't, I'll secretly accuse you of not having lived. I'm talking about attempting mind control. Telekinesis. All that good stuff.<br />I used to sit and stare at my pencil for hours during classes in a desperate attempt to make it float.<br /><br />Today I'd like to announce that, after many weeks of meditation, I have finally managed to achieve this elusive goal.<br /><br />Not that I'm able to float anything (at least not yet), or complete my household chores in the style of Mary Poppins (this is still up on my <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/01/the-suck-at-list.html" target="_blank">bucket list</a>), but I've actually achieved something much more difficult. I have succeeded in teleporting my boyfriend.<br /><br />It took us a while to realize that this is what was happening, but we're both absolutely certain of this now. <br />It started innocently. He'd be privately amusing himself in his man cave, thinking up some tunes, and I'd set the clock for one of my ten minute space out sessions, when about halfway through, like clockwork, he'd barge into the room. Any room. We have a pretty big house for just the two of us, so I've been able to experiment with that a little and it works <i>every single time</i>. One time I actually hid myself in the bedroom with the lights off and he came in dancing, blowing a whistle and waving a flag. We like to pretend that particular time was sports related to cover up the shame, but the fact is that he has never been into professional sports before. It's legit teleportation.<br /><br />Lately, through practice, I've been able to cover greater distances, where I start meditating while he is at work, only for him to barge in five minutes later, babbling something about taking up overtime. I'm sure this is putting a bit of a strain on his well-being. You don't just mess with people's mind like that without it taking some kind of toll.<br /><br />The last time, I feel, was particularly hard on him, since he appeared before me huffing and drenched in sweat.<br /><div style="margin-left: 10%;"><br />Him (wide eyed): "No shit... Again?"<br /><br />Me (serene as fuck): "Yeah. What happened, did you cycle through a hurricane or something?"<br /><br />Him: "Well I really had to hurry this time. How long did I have left?"<br /><br />Me *checks phone*: "Two and a half minutes..."</div><br />We've agreed that if we ever lose each other in the woods (as you do), I'd just have to meditate for a couple of minutes and he'd find me, which is a great comfort to me because I still get scared in the woods after seeing the Blair Witch Project.<br /><br />In order to further develop my supernatural abilities I am now enrolled in an actual mindfulness class with actual people whom I can't tell you anything about because they made us sign a legal document.<br /><br />I'm pretty sure I can still talk about me though, which is what I always do when I'm nervous so when my turn came up during the big round of introductions I managed to tell 20 people I'd never met that I have an anxiety disorder.<br />Apparently nobody else there did, or they didn't think it was an appropriate thing to share, or they weren't all suppressing panic attacks the entire time they were there which made them lapse into pathological honesty. Awesome.<br /><br />Then we had to do this age-old exercise where you (very mindfully) examine and then eat a raisin, and were encouraged to share our findings - <i>wrinkly, sweet, smelling kind of herb-y and oh my god who knew raisins can make a sound?</i><br /><br />I didn't say anything because I was still recovering from my previous outburst and all I could think when looking at this stupid raisin was: "Oh my fucking god, raisin! You used to be a grape! What happened?!"<br /><br />It tasted of sadness. When I chewed it, it cried in my mouth.<br /><br />This did not make it up on the whiteboard.<br /><br />I later managed to round off the epic awkwardness of it all by stubbing my toe and tripping over this stupid step (which hurt like hell because they made us take off our shoes) and&nbsp;<i>falling</i> into the room where people were quietly sharing snacks and avoiding eye contact during the break, exactly like fucking Anastasia Steele at the beginning of <a href="http://www.trilliesucksatstuff.com/2015/02/50-shades-of-grey.html" target="_blank">'50 Shades of Grey'</a>.<br />It did not end with me finding true love through S&amp;M though, as I'm sure my true love had tied himself to our bed in an attempt to prevent being involuntarily teleported across town as I spent the entire morning trying to meditate and keeping my mouth shut about the tragedy of raisins.<br /><br />Still not the shittiest power <i>evah</i>:<br /><br /><div class="videoWrapper"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="510" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K02LMcM2HQg" width="854"></iframe><br /></div><br />PS: My boyfriend has a serious thing for the chav girl on Misfits. Combined with him being all over Jane on Deadwood, I'm beginning to worry what this says about me. :/trilliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16721923709685610964noreply@blogger.com6